To prove you are a real person we have to look at your face once. This page says exactly what is collected, who touches it, how long it lives, and when it is destroyed — in plain words, because a policy nobody can read protects nobody.
The short version. A verification partner scans your ID and takes one selfie to check the faces match and that a live person is present. 5arz never receives your selfie, your ID image, or your facial geometry. We get a yes or no and a one-way hash that cannot be turned back into your document. The scan is destroyed once the match is done, and in every case within three years of your last interaction with us.
Illinois law defines a biometric identifier as a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry, and biometric information as anything derived from one that identifies a person. The only one of these 5arz's verification involves is a scan of face geometry, produced when your selfie is compared with the photograph on your government ID.
Photographs themselves are not biometric identifiers under that definition. The measurements taken from a photograph are.
When you verify, our identity partner — Didit, or Stripe Identity when Didit is unavailable — captures inside their own secure flow:
That capture happens on their infrastructure, not ours. 5arz is the party that asks for the check and receives the outcome.
Three things, and nothing else:
We do not hold your selfie, your ID image, or your facial geometry, and we have no way to reconstruct any of them.
To establish that you are a real, ID-verified human. That is the single thing 5arz exists to prove, and every credential we issue depends on it. The data is used for that, and to prevent one person creating many accounts.
It is never sold, leased, traded, or otherwise profited from. It is not used for advertising, and it is not used to train any model.
This is the schedule required by 740 ILCS 14/15(a):
We disclose biometric data to exactly one category of recipient: the identity partner performing the check, named in section 2. We do so only after you have consented, which is why the consent screen names them.
We do not disclose it to anyone else unless you ask us to in writing, or a valid warrant or subpoena requires it. Businesses that use 5arz to verify their users receive a credential stating that a real, ID-verified human was verified — never the underlying biometric data.
We apply the same standard of care we use for our most sensitive data, and no less than the industry standard. In practice the strongest protection is structural: we do not hold the biometric data at all. Data we never receive cannot be leaked by us. What we do hold is a salted one-way hash that is useless to anyone who takes it.
This policy is written to Illinois BIPA because it is the strictest standard we are subject to, and then applied to everyone, everywhere. It also addresses Texas CUBI, Washington's My Health My Data Act, and — where GDPR applies — biometric data as special-category data under Article 9, for which our lawful basis is your explicit consent.
If this policy changes, the version number changes with it. Every consent we record stores the version and a cryptographic hash of the exact words shown at the time, so we can always show what you actually agreed to — not merely what the current page says.
Questions, requests, or complaints: privacy@5arz.com. Postal: 5arz, 16192 Coastal Hwy, Lewes, DE 19958.
See also: Privacy Policy · Terms