Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains how gfpgaan.com ("we", "us", or "our") handles your personal data. We are an independent documentation site about GFPGAN, an open-source AI face restoration model; we are not affiliated with Tencent ARC, who develop the model. This site is supported by advertising, and the sections below set out exactly what that means for your data.

1. Image Data — Nothing Is Uploaded

The free photo enhancer on this site runs entirely in your browser. When you select a photo:

• The image is read into your browser's local memory only
• All processing — tone mapping, artifact smoothing, sharpening — runs on your own device
• No image data is transmitted to our servers, to our advertising partners, or anywhere else
• The image is discarded from memory when you close or refresh the page
• We have no access to, and no record of, any photo you process

This is a deliberate design choice. Photographs of faces are sensitive personal data, and the safest way to handle them is to never receive them in the first place.

2. Information We Collect

a) Server and CDN logs

Like most websites, our hosting provider records standard access information: IP address, browser type, operating system, referring URL, and pages requested. This is used for security monitoring and performance analysis, and is retained for a maximum of 30 days.

b) Contact form submissions

If you contact us through our form, we collect your name, email address, and message, and use them solely to reply. Submissions are processed by Web3Forms, a third-party service — see the Web3Forms privacy policy.

c) Advertising and cookies

This site displays advertising, which involves third-party cookies and similar technologies. Details are in section 3 and in our Cookie Policy.

3. Advertising and Third-Party Cookies

We disclose the following, as required by our advertising partners:

• Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to this website or other websites.
• Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and/or other sites on the internet.
• You may opt out of personalised advertising by visiting Google Ads Settings.
• You can opt out of a third-party vendor's use of cookies for personalised advertising at aboutads.info or, in Europe, at youronlinechoices.eu.
• Google's own handling of this data is described in the Google Privacy & Terms — How Google uses information from sites that use our services.

We display advertising through Google AdSense only. We do not run popunder, pop-up, vignette, interstitial, or auto-redirect advertising of any kind, and we do not permit advertising that interferes with reading the page.

4. Analytics

If analytics are active on this site, they are used only to understand aggregate traffic patterns — pages visited, approximate country, browser type. We do not build user profiles, and we do not sell or share analytics data with data brokers.

5. Legal Basis, GDPR and CCPA

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, our legal bases for processing are: legitimate interest (security logging, aggregate analytics), consent (advertising and analytics cookies, where a consent prompt is shown), and performance of a contract or pre-contractual steps (responding to your enquiry).

If you are a California resident, you have the right to know what personal information is collected, to request its deletion, and to opt out of its "sale" or "sharing" as those terms are defined by the CCPA/CPRA. We do not sell your personal information. Advertising cookies may constitute "sharing" for cross-context behavioural advertising; you can opt out using the links in section 3, or by contacting us.

6. Your Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:

• Access — request a copy of any personal data we hold about you
• Deletion — request erasure of your personal data
• Correction — request that inaccurate data be corrected
• Portability — receive your data in a portable format
• Objection — object to processing based on legitimate interest
• Withdraw consent — at any time, without affecting prior processing

To exercise any of these, email hello@gfpgaan.com. Because we hold so little data, most requests can be resolved immediately. You also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.

7. Data Retention

Server access logs are kept for a maximum of 30 days and then deleted. Contact form submissions are kept only as long as needed to resolve your enquiry. Advertising cookies are governed by the retention periods of the vendors listed in our Cookie Policy. We do not maintain a long-term database of user activity.

8. Children's Privacy

This site is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from them. If you believe a child has submitted personal information through this site, contact us and we will delete it promptly.

9. Security

We use HTTPS for all connections, host on managed infrastructure with security patching, and restrict access to the limited data we hold. No method of transmission over the internet is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

10. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be reflected in the "Last updated" date at the top of this page. Continuing to use the site after a change constitutes acceptance of the revised policy.

11. Contact

For privacy questions, access requests, or deletion requests, email hello@gfpgaan.com or use our contact form.