Where your face goes, exactly

This product only works if people trust it with a photo of their face. So instead of boilerplate, here is specifically what happens to it.

Your photo

Photos are stored in a private bucket, never served from a public URL. Raters see your photo through signed links that expire within the hour — a link that leaks stops working before it can spread. There is no public gallery, no browsing, no profile page: the only place your photo appears is inside a live head-to-head pair, to someone actively rating.

There is exactly one exception, and you control it. Once the site holds enough photos it publishes a leaderboard of the highest-rated photos, shown with a rank, a score, and any age or country you have chosen to display. You are never added to it automatically. If your score qualifies, we ask you on your results page, and nothing appears until you say yes. You can take it off again at any time, and scoring well will never put your face anywhere on its own.

Your control

You can pause your photo at any time from your results page — it leaves the rating pool immediately and no one is shown it until you resume. You can also permanently remove it, free, at any time: removal deletes the stored image itself, not just the listing, and returns your unused votes. Replacing your photo retires the old one permanently — a photo stands for seven days before it can be replaced free (removal doesn’t shorten that window; early replacement is the paid fresh start). Photos flagged by other users are hidden — immediately for the most serious report categories, after multiple independent reports otherwise — and then reviewed by a human.

You can optionally state an age and a heritage country on your results page, and choose whether either shows on your photo while people rate it. Both are entirely your own statement — never inferred from your photo or anything else — both are off by default, and you can change or remove them at any time. They are deleted with your account.

Who processes it

Three services touch a photo, each for one job: private object storage (Supabase) holds the encrypted-at-rest image; every submission is screened once for safety — nudity, apparent minors, impersonation — before it can enter the pool, by automated moderation (Sightengine, and an AI judge run on Anthropic’s Claude that checks the same rules) or by a human reviewer; and Stripe processes payments without any photo access. The liveness check at capture runs entirely in your browser — the face-geometry analysis never leaves your device, and we do not build or store biometric templates. No photo is ever sold, licensed, or used for advertising.

Your votes and your score

Votes are recorded to compute ratings, weigh rater quality, and build the group breakdowns. Your own score is visible only to you — results pages are private to your session and are excluded from search engines. When raters can share demographic details (a feature still being built), sharing will be optional and the details used only to show whose votes went where.

Your account

Rating needs no account at all. Adding a photo does — the account is what guarantees you can always reach and remove your own face, from any device, whatever happens to your cookies. Sign-in (Google or Apple) stores only the identity needed to recognise you; someone who joins through a research panel such as Prolific has their participant ID stored the same way, in place of an email. Payments are processed by Stripe; card details never touch this site’s servers.

What is never done

Photos are not sold, licensed, or used to train face-scoring AI. The only automated processing a photo goes through is capture verification (that it is a live camera shot) and safety moderation — never attractiveness scoring by a machine. This service is for adults: adding a photo requires an 18+ attestation, and moderation screens out apparent minors.

Erasure and access

Removing your photo deletes the stored image immediately. To delete your account and its remaining records entirely, or to request a copy of your data, email privacy@realrating.io from the address on your account and it is handled within 30 days. If you joined through a research panel such as Prolific and have no email on the account, message the researcher through the panel instead — the same 30 days apply.

Questions? Start with how the rating works or the terms.