Delete my data

Read this first, it may save you time

When you complete a check inside another organization's product, that organization decides what is collected and how long it is kept. We carry the check out on their instructions. In data-protection terms they are the controller and we are their processor, and in practice it means the organization can usually act faster than we can: they know who you are, and we do not.

So the quickest route is almost always to ask the organization you verified with. If you would rather come to us, or you have asked them and got nowhere, use the form below. We will act on it either way.

Why we ask for so little

We do not hold your name, your date of birth or your address. A liveness check never collects them. That is a deliberate limit on what we keep, and it has a consequence here: you cannot identify yourself to us the way you would to a bank, because there is nothing on our side to match a name against.

Asking you for identity documents to prove who you are would mean collecting more personal data from you than we ever held in the first place, which is a strange way to answer a privacy request. So the form asks for four things at most:

• An email address we can reply to. Without one we cannot answer you at all.
• Which organization you verified with. This is where we look, and it is who we may need to pass your request to.
• Roughly when it was. A month and a year is enough. A guess is fine.
• Any reference they gave you. Optional, and often the only thing that ties a request to a specific check.

Please do not send us copies of your ID with this form. If we do need to be more certain who we are dealing with before we delete something, we will ask you in reply, and we will ask for the least we can get away with.

What happens next

• You get a reference number on screen. Nothing is deleted at that moment.
• A person at Cognau reads the request. We may write back with a question, because we have to be reasonably sure a request comes from the person it concerns. A form that deleted on demand would be a way for somebody else to erase your records.
• If the check belongs to an organization that must keep it, for example under anti-money-laundering rules, we will tell you that plainly and point you to them.
• We reply either way, usually within a few days and in any case within one month.

One thing this form will never tell you: whether we hold anything about you. The screen you see after submitting is the same screen for everybody, because a page that said “we found your records” would let anyone check whether a given person had been verified.

Your other rights

Deletion is one of several rights you have. You can also ask for a copy of what we hold, correct it, object to or restrict how it is used, and withdraw consent at any time. Those are described in our Privacy Notice, alongside the Biometric Data Policy that sets out how long anything is kept. You can also complain to your data-protection authority.

You can still email [email protected] if you prefer. The form simply makes sure your request is logged and tracked rather than sitting in an inbox.