Umax, Qoves and LEVEL: what each one does with your face

The short version

All three take photographs of your face and return guidance. They differ most in what they will not tell you, how old you have to be, and what happens to the photograph afterwards — and those are the three things hardest to find out and easiest to check once you know where to look.

Umax

The largest by a distance, and the fastest to use: one selfie, a score in seconds. On its App Store listing, checked 17 September 2026, it carries a 9+ age rating and is sold by an individual rather than a company. Its App Privacy section declares “Identifiers” used to track you, plus coarse location and device ID for third-party advertising and analytics. It does not declare a face-data, photo or biometric category at all.

A 9+ rating on a product built around photographing a face is the single most consequential difference on this page, and it is a fact rather than an opinion: it means the store believes a nine-year-old is an appropriate user.

Qoves

The most substantial of the three: a real company, Qoves Inc. of Wilmington, Delaware, selling detailed reports and also selling to aesthetic clinics. Adults only — its privacy policy says it does “not knowingly solicit information from or market to children under the age of 18”, which puts it well ahead of Umax.

That same policy, checked 17 September 2026, contains no occurrence of the words biometric, BIPA, GDPR or retention. It states no period for which photographs are kept. And it says: “We may use your data to refine machine learning algorithms and various programs, enhancing our product and advancing research in facial aesthetics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.”

LEVEL

18+, established from a date of birth recorded on the account rather than a tick box and re-checked wherever a photograph is accepted. Photographs are destroyed after 365 days without use by a scheduled job, and can be deleted immediately from the account. Every processor that receives a photograph is named in the privacy policy. Nothing is used to train a model. AI-generated images are labelled as generated rather than shown as an “after”. And it opens a country only once it can meet that country’s rules for photographs of a face, which is why some places are still closed.

It also refuses to produce a score, a rating or a ranking of any kind. That is the product decision the other two do not make, and it is the reason to pick this one or to reject it.

Where LEVEL is the weaker choice

If you want a number, LEVEL will never give you one, and Umax will give you one in thirty seconds for about four dollars a week. If you want a detailed report today from an operating business with two years behind it, Qoves has that and a clinic channel besides. LEVEL is newer, has no track record you can check, and its analysis engine is not yet connected — a capture today is stored and queued rather than returned.

And its own legal documents, at the time of writing, say on their face that no lawyer has reviewed them. That is disclosed on the privacy policy and the terms rather than buried, but it is a real difference and it belongs on this page.

How to judge any of these yourself, including this one

None of the below requires trusting a comparison written by a competitor. Each one is a thing you can check in a few minutes:

• Search the privacy policy for the word “biometric”. A product built on facial measurement whose policy never uses the word has not thought about the law that governs it.
• Look for a retention period in days or months. “We keep data as long as necessary” is not a period. If there is no number, assume forever.
• Check whether your photographs train their model. The sentence is usually there if you search for “machine learning”, “improve our services” or “research”.
• Check the age rating in the store. It takes ten seconds and it tells you who the product was built for.
• See whether a company is named, with an address. An app sold by an individual has no corporate entity between a mistake and you.
• Ask what it refuses to do. A product that will answer any question about your face with equal confidence is not being careful with the ones it cannot answer.

Sources and dates

Checked 17 September 2026: the Umax App Store listing for its age rating, seller and App Privacy declarations, and the Qoves privacy policy for the quoted sentences and the absent terms. Both may have changed since; the point of naming the date and linking the source is that you can tell. LEVEL’s own claims are in its methodology registry, privacy policy and questions page.