VEILWATCH Verify mobile app · Last updated 21 September 2026
VEILWATCH Verify checks that a passport is genuine and that the person holding it is the person presenting it. It only ever runs because an organisation asked you to verify your identity, and it only ever runs once per request.
Verifications through this service are requested by government departments and government regulatory bodies. The body that sent you the verification link decides what your information is used for and keeps the record of it. VEILWATCH operates the app and the verification service on their behalf, passes the result to them, and does not use your information for its own purposes or keep it afterwards.
Because the requesting body may be in a different country from you, your information may be transferred across a border in the course of reaching them.
If you want to know why you were asked to verify, or you want a copy of what was submitted, contact that body — once delivery is complete they hold the only copy. You can reach us about this service itself at identitysupport@veilwatch.net.
The camera runs continuously while this step is open so it can find those lines. A single photograph of the page is taken at the moment it is read successfully, and passed on with the rest of the verification so the requesting body has a record of the document it was shown. Nothing is checked from that photograph — the details that matter are read from the chip.
The signature and the challenge response are what let us tell a real passport from a copied or altered one.
Two of the items above are biometric: the portrait stored on your passport chip, and the photograph the app takes of your face. Both are treated as sensitive information.
They are collected only after you have been told what the verification is for and have chosen to continue, they are used only for that verification, and they are deleted on the schedule in section 6. They are never used to train any system, never added to a searchable database of faces, and never used to identify you in any other context.
Our server compares the photograph of your face with the portrait on your passport chip, to check that the person using the app is the person the passport belongs to. The comparison produces a similarity score, which is reported to the organisation that requested the verification along with both images.
The comparison can come back as inconclusive, and often will where a passport photograph is old. An inconclusive result is never treated as a failure; where the outcome matters, a person reviews the two images.
Finding the text on the photo page and detecting that a face is in frame both happen entirely on your phone, using Google's on-device ML Kit libraries. Those steps send nothing anywhere. Only the finished results described in section 2 leave the device.
Your face photograph is held only in the app's memory. It is never saved to your photo library or kept in the app's storage, and it is cleared from the device as soon as the verification has been sent. The app uses the ordinary camera: it does not use Face ID, the TrueDepth depth sensor, or face-tracking features. The on-device face detection only checks that your face is centred, facing the camera and still, so the photo is taken at the right moment; what it detects is used for that instant and is never saved or sent.
That is the complete list. Your information is not sold, not shared with advertisers or data brokers, and not disclosed to anyone else except where the law requires it.
We do not retain your verification after it has been delivered. When the requesting body confirms receipt, the passport details, the photograph of the page, the chip portrait and your face photograph are all erased from this service immediately, as part of that same delivery, not by a cleanup job that runs later.
There is one exception, and it is the only circumstance in which any of this information exists here for longer than a moment:
Twenty-four hours is therefore the outer limit on how long your passport data or either photograph can exist on our systems, and it applies only to verifications that could not be delivered. There is no way to retrieve a verification from this service after delivery, including by us: it is not held back for collection, and the interfaces that report on a verification return only whether the checks passed, never the underlying data.
What we keep indefinitely is the record that a verification happened and whether its checks passed. That contains no passport data, no images, and nothing derived from your face. The face comparison's score is erased along with the photographs.
The body that requested the verification keeps its own copy of what it received, under its own retention rules. Ask them about it.
Each verification link or QR code works once, and expires. Scanning one tells the app only what the check is for and who asked for it — it does not reveal whose identity is expected, so a link seen by someone else discloses nothing about you.
Depending on where you live you may have further rights over your personal and biometric information, including rights of access, correction, deletion and complaint to a regulator. Those rights are exercised against the requesting body, which holds your information; we will assist them in responding.
Everything the app sends travels over an encrypted connection to a single fixed address built into the app; it will not send your information anywhere else, even if a link tells it to. The app screens are marked so the passport details and your photograph do not appear in your phone's app switcher, and on Android are excluded from screenshots and screen recordings.
No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise.
The app is not directed at children and is not intended for use without the involvement of the organisation requesting the verification. Where a passport belonging to a minor is verified, it is at that organisation's direction and under its responsibility.
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. Material changes affecting how existing information is handled will be communicated through the organisation that requested your verification.