Privacy notice
What Hawk Ai does with personal data, why, and for how long.
Hawk Ai verifies that a person is who they say they are, on behalf of the company that sent them here. This notice describes what happens to personal data in that process. It is written to be checked against the system rather than to reassure: every claim below is something you can verify in the product or ask us to demonstrate.
Who is responsible for what
For applicant data, the company that asked you to verify is the controller — they decide that a check happens and why. Hawk Ai is the processor, acting on their instructions. If you want your data corrected or erased, the controller is the right place to start; we act on their instruction and we can also act on yours where the law gives you a direct right.
For our own business contacts — someone who signs their company up, or writes to us — Hawk Ai is the controller.
What we collect about an applicant
Only what the check needs, and only what you provide or what the check itself produces:
| Category | Examples | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Identity | Name, date of birth, nationality, address | To establish who you are |
| Document | The images you capture, the machine-readable zone, document number and expiry | To establish the document is genuine and yours |
| Biometric | A selfie, and the comparison between it and the document portrait | To establish the document belongs to you and not someone holding it |
| Contact | E-mail address, phone number | To reach you, and as a fraud signal (age of the address, whether the number is VoIP) |
| Device and behaviour | IP address, browser and operating system, timezone, typing cadence, how many times a form was pasted into | To detect automation and account-takeover patterns |
| Public profiles | Handles you confirm, and public profile data matched to your name — followers, account age, profile photo similarity | To check a real person exists behind the identity. Only with your consent, and only public data |
| Screening | Whether your name and date of birth resemble an entry on a sanctions, PEP or adverse-media list | Legal obligation of the controller |
Biometric data and, in some jurisdictions, screening results are special-category data. They are processed on the basis of your explicit consent and the controller's legal obligation, and they are encrypted at rest.
What we never do
- We never post, follow, message or interact from any account. The footprint check reads public data and writes nothing.
- We never sell personal data, and we do not share it for advertising.
- We never use applicant data to train models.
- We do not run advertising or analytics trackers on this site. See the cookie notice.
- "No footprint" alone never rejects anybody. An absent online presence is not evidence of fraud, and the engine does not treat it as such.
Automated decisions
A verification can be approved or referred automatically. Where that happens you have the right to be told, to ask for a human to look, and to contest the outcome. Four outcomes can never be produced automatically in your favour and cannot be switched off by the controller: a confirmed sanctions match, a document showing signs of tampering, an applicant who appears to be under age, and a required check that did not run. That last one matters — if a check could not be performed, the system treats it as *not passed* rather than scoring it zero.
How long we keep it
Two separate clocks run, and the difference matters:
- Document images — your passport or ID photograph, and your selfie — are erased 90 days after the decision by default. The controller can shorten that window; they cannot extend it beyond their own legal obligation.
- The verification record — that a check happened, what it concluded, and the factors behind it — is kept for as long as the controller's anti-money-laundering obligations require, typically five to seven years. Our default is seven. This is the part people are most often surprised by, so it is stated plainly: after 90 days we no longer hold your face, but we do still hold the fact that you were verified and the reasoning.
- Audit records of who looked at what are kept for their own period, because an audit trail that can be deleted is not an audit trail.
- Business contact data is kept while there is a relationship, then deleted.
When a window expires, deletion is automatic — a sweep runs every six hours and writes what it erased to the audit log, because "we deleted it" is itself a fact an examiner will ask you to evidence. You can also ask for erasure at any time; see *Your rights*.
Where it is processed
The service runs on Hugging Face infrastructure. The database lives on the container's local disk with encrypted snapshots to a private repository. Sub-processors are listed in the data processing agreement. Data may be processed outside your country; where that happens it relies on the transfer mechanism named in the DPA.
Your rights
Access, correction, erasure, restriction, objection, portability, and withdrawal of consent. Withdrawing consent for the footprint check stops that check; it does not undo a decision already made, and the controller may still be required to keep the record.
To exercise any of these, contact the company that asked you to verify, or write to hello@ai-sns.io and we will route it. We answer within 30 days.
Complaints
You can complain to your data protection authority. In Japan that is the Personal Information Protection Commission; in the EU and UK, your national supervisory authority.
Changes
We will change this notice as the product changes. The date at the top is the last change. Material changes will be announced in the changelog.