Why SnapVix doesn't use facial recognition on children's photos

It would be technically straightforward to add facial recognition to SnapVix — match a face once, auto-tag it across every photo in an event. A lot of platforms in this space do exactly that. We don't, and it's a deliberate choice, not an oversight.

The photos running through SnapVix are overwhelmingly of children. Facial recognition means storing biometric data — a fundamentally different category of risk than storing an order history or a billing address. India's DPDP Act has specific consent requirements around children's data, and biometric data is treated as sensitive in most data protection frameworks globally. Doing this properly would mean real legal review of consent flows, retention rules, and parental rights — before any of it touches a child's face.

So instead, SnapVix matches photos to students through access codes and QR-code-based methods. It's a few seconds slower per shoot than face-matching would be. It also means we've never had to store a single biometric record, never had to build a consent flow for it, and never have to explain to a parent why their child's face is in a recognition database.

Our AI features still help with the parts that don't require identifying who's in a photo — counting how many people are in a group shot, tagging the scene (sports day, classroom, ceremony), flagging near-duplicate shots from a burst. All of that runs on infrastructure we control, with zero photos ever sent to a third-party AI vendor. The line we won't cross is identity.