You send us a photograph of your face to have it turned into a passport photo. That is personal data, and this page is the account we owe you of it: what we hold, why, for how long, who else touches it, and what you can make us do about it.
ReadyID is operated by Yao Lu, a sole trader trading as ReadyID. We are the controller of the personal data described here — we decide what is collected and why. Correspondence address: 12 Barnack Grove, Royston, SG8 5HQ. Write to privacy@readyid.co.uk about anything on this page.
ReadyID is not affiliated with HM Passport Office, the Post Office, or gov.uk. We check your photo against the published passport photo rules; we do not submit anything to anyone.
The photograph you upload
The image file itself, at whatever size and format your device sent it, plus the versions we make from it: the colour-corrected frame, the watermarked preview, and the finished 35 × 45 mm photo.
Measurements taken from it
The position of your face in the frame, the angle of your head, the height of your head from chin to crown, and how evenly lit your face is. These are numbers about the picture, used to crop it correctly and to tell you whether it passes. They are kept alongside the photo and go when it goes.
Your email address
Given at checkout, because the finished photo is delivered by email. Nothing else is sent to it — there is no mailing list to be added to.
Your payment
Handled by Stripe. Card numbers are entered on Stripe’s own form and never reach our server. We are told the reference, the amount and whether it succeeded.
Technical logs
Each request to the site is recorded — the internet address it came from, the time, and the page asked for. This is what we would use to spot abusive traffic or to work out what happened during an outage, and it is used for nothing else. Opening your order page puts your order reference into that log; nothing else about you is in it. It is kept for no more than 14 days, then deleted.
Web analytics
We count page views with self-hosted software called Umami, running on our own server. It is told the page path, the referring page, your country, device type, screen size and browser language — and nothing else. It sets no cookies, no analytics company or other third party receives anything, and it holds no name, email address or photograph. To count visits without following you, it derives a random identifier from your address and browser that changes every day; the address itself is not kept. It is never linked to your order, your email or your upload.
Our lawful basis is performance of a contract (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(b)). You ask us to make you a passport photo; we cannot do that without the photo, and we cannot deliver it without an address to send it to. Everything above is what the job requires and nothing beyond it.
This is not consent-based, which means there is no consent box to tick and none to withdraw. If you would rather we did not hold your photo, the remedy is to ask us to delete it, or simply not to upload one.
Two entries above are not something your job needs: the technical log, and the page counts. Both rest on our legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)) — a service that cannot see its own traffic cannot tell an outage from an attack, and one that cannot count visits cannot tell whether anyone finds it useful. Neither holds anything that identifies you, and the analytics are aggregate counts, not a profile.
We detect that there is a face in the frame and where it sits, so the photo can be cropped to specification. We do not use any of it to recognise or identify you, we do not compare your face to anyone else’s, and we build no face database. There is nothing here we could use to tell you apart from another customer.
Your photographs
Deleted from our photo storage as soon as the finished photo has been emailed to you — the original, the preview and the final file all go together, in the same step that sends your email. If you never complete a purchase, nothing tells us you have gone, so a sweep runs regularly and deletes any photo it finds that is more than 48 hours old. The same sweep is the backstop if a deletion at delivery does not succeed. In normal operation no photograph stays with us beyond 48 hours; a period when our servers are down is a period when nothing is deleted, and the sweep catches up when they return.
Unfinished jobs
The record of a photo being processed expires by itself 24 hours after it is created.
Order records
The reference, amount, status and your email address are kept for 90 days, so that the printing link in your delivery email keeps working and so we can help if something went wrong. They then expire on their own. These records hold no photograph.
Technical logs
Kept for no more than 14 days. The server enforces this schedule itself; it is not something we remember to do.
Web analytics
Visit records — which page, from where, on what kind of device — are anonymous and are never linked to anything else about you. They are kept as counts until we delete them.
Upload counts
To stop one connection running up our costs, we keep a running count of uploads per network address, and a fingerprint of each photo so that sending the same one twice is not processed twice. Both expire on the same schedule as the photo they relate to, and neither is used to build a picture of you.
Records held by others
Stripe keeps its own record of the payment, and our email provider its own record of the message, each for their own periods and under their own notices. Deleting our copy does not reach into theirs.
We use other companies to do specific parts of the job, under contract with us. Which ones are in use depends on how the service is configured; as it stands, they are:
Face detection
Google Cloud Vision, which is sent your photo to locate the face in it.
Background replacement
fal.ai, or remove.bg, which is sent your photo to separate you from the background behind you.
Payment
Stripe, which handles the card payment and holds the card details. Stripe also uses payment data for its own fraud prevention and legal obligations, and is responsible for that use in its own right rather than on our behalf.
Email delivery
Our email provider, which is given your address and the finished photo as attachments.
Storage and hosting
The photo store and the job and order records, and the servers the site runs on.
Abuse prevention
Cloudflare Turnstile, which checks that an upload came from a real browser rather than an automated script. It is not used on every visit: it appears only if a single connection sends us an unusual number of photos, or if the service is under unusual load. It is never sent your photo — only the fact that a check was requested, and the technical signals your browser offers it. Most people who see it are cleared without having to do anything.
Some of these process data outside the UK. Ask us at privacy@readyid.co.uk and we will tell you which providers are in use for your order and what we hold in writing with each of them.
You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, to restrict or object to what we do with it, and to have it sent to you or another provider in a portable form. Ask at privacy@readyid.co.uk. We will answer within one month.
In practice a deletion request is usually already satisfied: if you have had your photo, the image is gone from our storage, and what remains is the order record. Ask and we will remove that too. We cannot reach into the records the payment and email providers keep of their own dealings with you; those are theirs, and their notices say what they do with them.
If you think we have handled your data badly, please tell us first — but you are entitled to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk, or on 0303 123 1113, whether or not you come to us.
There are none to consent to. ReadyID sets no analytics, advertising or tracking cookies. The page-counting described above needs no cookie: the software is ours, it sets nothing on your device, and no analytics company receives anything. Stripe sets its own cookies on the payment step for fraud prevention, which is what makes taking a card payment possible at all.
Last reviewed 2 September 2026. If this notice changes in a way that affects what we do with photos already sent to us, we will say so here.