The sentence about how long they keep it, decoded

Read a retention clause by its phrasing: "as long as necessary", a fixed number of days, "until you delete it", "we do not store your photos" and "anonymised" each promise something different and checkable. Most privacy policies reuse this same handful, and the wording is more informative than it looks.

"As long as necessary"

This is the vaguest and most common version, and it is not meaningless - it usually means retention is tied to a business purpose rather than a fixed clock, which in practice means the file stays until the service stops needing it for the reason it collected it in the first place. The catch is that "necessary" is defined by the service, not by you, and purposes like fraud prevention, model improvement or dispute resolution can extend it well past the moment you assumed the interaction was over. A policy that uses only this phrase, with no number anywhere, is telling you retention is open-ended in practice even if it is bounded in principle.

A specific number of days

"Deleted after 30 days," or any fixed figure, is the most checkable version and the one to prefer when comparing tools. It usually describes an automated expiry rule on the storage layer itself rather than a manual process, which means it is more likely to actually happen on schedule - automated storage expiry is the mechanism behind most of these numbers, and it is worth understanding once rather than trusting the number blind. The number applies to the primary copy; it says nothing on its own about backups, logs or anything the number's own clause does not name, which is the next entry.

"Until you delete it"

This shifts the clock to you, which sounds like control and mostly is, with one gap worth checking: whether deletion in the app actually triggers deletion on the server, or only removes your access to view it. A "soft delete" hides the file from your account while the underlying object persists, sometimes indefinitely, sometimes for a retention window the policy does not mention because it considers the file already gone from your side. The distinction between what a deletion request removes from your view and what it removes from existence is worth reading closely before trusting this phrase.

"We do not store your photos"

This is a claim about the image specifically, and it is compatible with several different realities: in-memory-only processing that never touches disk, short-lived storage with an aggressive expiry, or storage of a derived representation - an embedding, a score, a thumbnail - rather than the original file. All three are honestly described by that sentence, and they are not equivalent, which is why the sentence deserves a closer look rather than being taken as a single fact.

"Anonymised" or "aggregated" data

This phrase usually appears as an exception to an otherwise clear retention promise - the file or result is deleted, but an anonymised or aggregated version may be kept indefinitely for research or model improvement. The word doing the work is "anonymised," and for a photograph specifically it is a harder claim to make true than it sounds, since an image can carry identifying detail well beyond a face. The ICO's guidance on storage limitation sets the bar: data no longer needed must be erased or anonymised so individuals cannot be identified, and simply taking it offline does not count. A clause that uses this phrase without describing what was actually removed to earn the label is worth reading as "we kept something, and we are calling it safe."

What this does not cover

None of the above addresses backups, which exist specifically to survive deletion and can carry a copy well past whatever the primary retention clause states. It also does not cover what happens if the service is breached while a file is within its retention window, which is a separate question from how long the file was meant to be kept. None of the phrasings above say where the server enforcing them actually sits, and which country's law applies is a related question covered in data region and jurisdiction.

Reading one for yourself

A retention clause worth trusting names a duration, names what happens to backups, and distinguishes the image from anything derived from it. Rate Cock's policy states its retention terms in these specific ways rather than relying on the vaguest phrasing alone, which is the standard worth holding any tool to. A measurement session has its own retention question, since a logged figure is data too even once the photo behind it is gone, and Measure My Cock addresses that from the data side. A commissioned human review is retained differently again - a written assessment is not deleted the same way an inference cache is - and Rate Penis's review documentation covers that difference directly. Comparing retention language across several rating tools side by side is the kind of survey Penis Rater's tools coverage is built to do.