Compliance
Verankila is the kind of app that has to earn trust structurally, not just promise it -- it reads your face.
EU AI Act -- emotion recognition system
Verankila voluntarily classifies itself as an emotion recognition system under Article 3(39) of the EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689): it infers tentative emotional states from facial biometric data by automated means. This classification triggers the transparency and prohibited-use obligations below.
Article 50 -- transparency
- Active-use indicator: a persistent, visible on-screen indicator is shown whenever the camera/emotion-recognition pipeline is running.
- Tentative framing: every reading is presented as a tentative cue ("this expression reads as...", "does this fit?") -- never as a fact or a clinical determination. Language implying certainty or clinical determination is avoided throughout, enforced by an automated build check on the app's own copy.
- Consent gate: a consent screen at first run informs you that Verankila is an AI emotion-recognition system before the camera is ever used.
Article 5 -- prohibited contexts
Verankila is not intended for workplace or educational deployment, which the EU AI Act prohibits for emotion-recognition systems outside medical/safety contexts. A use-context gate at onboarding is designed to refuse those contexts. Verankila is built for personal, individual use only.
GDPR data minimization
Real-time processing uses only 52 blendshape coefficients per frame -- not raw camera frames or a full facial mesh -- held in a short rolling window and discarded when a reading session ends. Session recording (face crop, blendshapes, readings) happens only if you explicitly opt in, and stays on your device. See Privacy for the full picture.
Scientific limitations
Verankila's classifier reaches approximately 50% accuracy on a held-out test split -- well above chance for seven categories, but not clinically reliable. A reading does not and cannot indicate why you feel something; no inference from face to life circumstances is made or implied. Cross-demographic fairness (accuracy across skin tone, age, and gender presentation) has not yet been formally evaluated -- this is required before any public release and is tracked as open engineering work.
What we don't do
- No cloud or server-side processing of your face
- No clinical assessment or treatment claim
- No workplace or education deployment
- No accounts, analytics, or advertising
- No third-party data sharing