Privacy notice

1. Who this is for

Four different kinds of people appear in BibSnap’s records, and only one of them chose to be here. You may be more than one at once.

• You bought photographs. You gave us a phone number and possibly an email address. You do not have an account.
• You are in an event’s photographs. A photographer you may never have met uploaded pictures of you. You gave us nothing.
• An organiser uploaded a start list with you on it. Your name and number reached us from the race you entered, not from you.
• You sell on BibSnap. You have an account, and you gave us a payout account to send money to.

2. If you bought photographs

• What we keep. The mobile money number charged, any different number you asked us to send the link to, the email address if you gave one, which photographs you bought at which event on which date, what you paid, and the payment reference our provider returned. If a payment was declined, the reason the provider gave is stored with it.
• Your receipt page is public to anyone holding its reference. It shows the email address the link went to and watermarked thumbnails of everything you bought, and it does not expire. The reference is long and not guessable, but anyone you forward it to can see all of that. This is deliberate, so that a receipt still works months later — but you should know it before you share the link.
• The studio selling the photographs can see your contact details. Every owner, administrator and member of that organisation sees your phone number and email address against your order in their dashboard. A photographer invited only to help tag bib numbers is a member and sees them too.
• Your download link is the only key to your files. Anyone holding it can download them until it expires or reaches its download limit, both shown on the page. If you send it to the wrong number we cannot pull it back; only BibSnap staff can revoke a link, by refunding the order.
• An order record says where you were. It ties a phone number to a named race on a named date. We treat it that way.

3. If you appear in an event's photographs

You did not upload anything and you did not agree to anything. The photographer holds the copyright and the relationship with the event; we host and sell on their behalf. What that means in practice:

• Every photograph is sent to Google to read bib numbers. An unwatermarked copy of each picture, 2048 pixels on its longest edge, is sent to Google’s Generative AI service so the numbers in it can be read automatically. Your face is in that copy. It is not used for anything but reading the numbers and — where the organiser has turned face matching on — working out the face templates below. It is deleted from our storage as soon as that is done.
• Face matching is off unless the organiser turns it on. Where it is on, we work out a face template for every face in that event’s photographs — a list of several hundred numbers describing the shape of a face. It is not a picture and cannot be turned back into one by us. It is used only to match faces to photographs inside that same event.
• A template is not attached to your name — but a match can be. The template itself carries no identity. If the organiser has uploaded a start list, a match between a template and an entrant is recorded against that entrant’s name and number, so at that point the platform does hold “this named person appears in this photograph”.
• Searching with a selfie does not store the selfie. The image is matched and discarded. Nothing about it is kept, logged or written anywhere.
• Asking to be removed does store the photo you send, and shows it to the organiser. That is the one place a selfie is kept. A person has to be able to see your photo and the photographs you want removed side by side to check you are the same person — otherwise anyone with a picture of you could erase you from an event. The image is private, is shown only to that event’s organiser, and is deleted the moment they decide either way. If they never decide, it stays until they do.
• The organiser decides, and may refuse. Removal requests go to the event’s owner or administrator, not to BibSnap, and a refusal deletes nothing. Nothing chases them for an answer. If that goes wrong for you, write to us.
• What deletes a face template. The organiser turning face matching off, the event being archived, or the photograph being deleted. There is no time limit and nothing expires on its own: an event left published keeps its templates indefinitely.
• There is no age check. Race photography includes children, and faces are indexed without regard to age. If your child is in an event’s photographs and you want them out, write to us.

4. If an organiser uploaded a start list with you on it

• Where it came from. The event organiser, from their own entry records. We did not collect it from you and you were not asked.
• What it holds. Your name, your bib number, and whichever of your phone number and email address the organiser had.
• What we do with it. The organiser can have us send you a message saying photographs of you are available, with a link. The organiser is charged per photograph for sending it.
• The message arrives as “Zuhile”. That is the registered sender name of the company that operates BibSnap. It will not say “BibSnap”, and it does not currently explain how we got your number or offer a way to stop.
• How to stop it. Reply to us at support@usezuhile.com and we will remove you from that event’s list by hand. There is no automatic unsubscribe and no suppression list yet, so ask the organiser too if you do not want to be on next year’s.

5. If you sell on BibSnap

• Your account. Name, email address, and which organisation you belong to. Sessions are kept in a cookie.
• Your payout account. The mobile money or bank account you nominate is sent to our payment provider so they can confirm the registered account-holder’s name, and both are then stored. Platform administrators can see them.
• What administrators can see. Platform staff can see your commercial terms, your balance, your events, your photographs, and the buyers of your photographs. Every administrator action, successful or refused, is logged with who did it and what they were looking at, with anything resembling a credential stripped out.
• Your buyers’ details are yours to look after too. You can see their phone numbers and email addresses. They are the buyers’ personal data, not your mailing list.

6. Who else receives it, and where it physically is

None of it is in Zambia. The database — accounts, orders, phone numbers, start lists and face templates — runs on a server in Oregon, United States. Photographs and every file derived from them are stored in Virginia, United States, in a storage bucket shared with another application operated by the same company.

• Amazon Web Services — United States. Every photograph, preview and thumbnail, the unwatermarked copy used for bib reading, and any selfie sent with a removal request. Separately, the server the database runs on.
• Google. An unwatermarked copy of each photograph, for reading bib numbers. On Google’s own infrastructure.
• Lenco, our payment provider. The buyer’s mobile money number, the amount and the order reference — no name and no email address. Separately, a studio’s payout account, to confirm the registered account-holder’s name and to send money.
• ExciteSMS, our text message gateway. The recipient’s mobile number and the full text of the message.
• Resend, our email provider. The recipient’s email address and the full text of the message.
• The studio selling the photographs. Buyer phone numbers and email addresses for their own events, wherever that studio is.

We have not established where our payment, messaging and email providers process data, so this notice does not claim a country for them.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for advertising. There is no advertising network, analytics service or tracking pixel anywhere in this site.

7. How long we keep it

Plainly: orders are kept indefinitely. Nothing in BibSnap deletes an order, an order line, a download record or an administrator log, and no scheduled job prunes them. That includes checkouts that were declined or abandoned — if you started a purchase and were never charged, your number is still held.

The unwatermarked copy sent for bib reading is deleted as soon as it has been used — by whichever job finished with it, whether that job succeeded or failed. A storage rule clears anything a crash leaves behind within a day. There are none held today.

Face templates last as long as the event does — until the organiser turns face matching off, archives the event, or the photograph is deleted. A removal-request selfie is deleted when the organiser decides. Download links expire on their own.

8. Automated decisions, and that they get things wrong

Bib numbers are read by a model and misread often enough to matter, particularly on a creased or turned number. Face matching is a similarity judgement, not an identification, and it is less accurate for some faces than others. Neither decides anything about you beyond which photographs you are shown — but where an organiser sends photographs to entrants, a wrong match means somebody is told a photograph is of them when it is not. Check the previews before you buy, and tell us if a photograph attributed to you is not you.

9. Cookies and what runs in your browser

A cookie keeps you signed in if you have an account. Your cart is kept in your own browser and never sent to us until you check out. That is all: no advertising cookies, no analytics, no third-party scripts, no session recording.

10. What you can ask for, and what actually happens

Write to support@usezuhile.com. Everything below is done by a person reading that mailbox — there is no self-service button for any of it except removing yourself from an event’s face search, which has its own page on each event.

• A copy of what we hold about you. We will put it together by hand.
• Correction. Ask, and we will change it.
• Deletion. We can remove your face templates, take you off a start list, and revoke a download link. We cannot delete the order record for a completed sale, because it is part of the financial record.
• A photograph taken down. Tell us which event and which photograph. The photographer owns the copyright, so we will take it out of sale and tell them why rather than deciding for them.
• Objecting to messages. Say so and we will stop, and take you off that event’s list.

If you are not satisfied with how we handle it, you can complain to the Data Protection Commissioner in Zambia.

11. Security, honestly

Photographs you have not bought are watermarked, and the full-resolution files are never public — they are released only through a link issued after a payment we have verified. Payments are handled by our provider; we never see your PIN and we do not store card details, because we do not take cards. Administrator actions are logged.

We are not going to claim more than that. No system is proof against everything, and a privacy notice that promises it is not worth reading.

12. Changes

We may update this notice. We do not currently keep a copy of the version you read, so this page is the only record of what it says; the date at the top is when it last changed. The terms and conditions cover what you may do with photographs and how selling works.