How Popsa protects your privacy while curating your memories

Our photos tell the story of our lives. They hold so much value – emotion, meaning, our sense of who we are. Reconnecting people with their memories has always been our mission here at Popsa, but privacy is also one of our top priorities. Popsa Memories is no different. Every moment we surface from your life is for your eyes only and completely under your control. 

Here, we’ll take you through why Popsa Memories needs full photo access to function properly, and how the feature keeps your memories private throughout the curation process. Whether we generate a Rewind or Journey, your photos are unseen from start to finish.

How is data processed?

Popsa Memories is built on PrivateContext™, Popsa's on-device intelligence layer developed over a decade of machine learning work. Memories automatically detects the most important people, places and activities that make up a life – recognising when something worth remembering happened, and filtering out sensitive scenes so a difficult period never resurfaces without warning. Nothing is ever uploaded, and no one at Popsa ever sees the photos – photos only leave your device when you choose to print them. 

Memories curates Rewinds and Journeys by detecting photo metadata such as geographical coordinates or the time of day. For example, if you visited the Greek islands on holiday, our AI models would recognise that you’ve travelled to a new place, away from your usual location, and turn those pictures into an album. The beaches you sunbathed on, mezze you ate and loved ones you explored with, would all remain on your phone until you decided to print them. Private, on device, always.

What does giving us full access to your camera roll actually mean?  

For the curation process to function properly, it’s all about the metadata. Memories needs full access to your camera roll to uncover this information and this information only, not to inspect what your photos actually look like. All our AI models receive is a little set of notes about each photo. This could include when and approximately where it’s taken or whether people and objects are present, but we never actually see the real content – that remains completely private to you. Opt-outs are being built to refine the experience further but, ultimately, if you limit library access, Memories can’t function.  

Another important tip is to ensure your location services are always switched on – if Memories doesn’t know where a photo was taken, the quality of your Rewind or Journey will suffer. Taking photos and documenting your life remains the best way to enhance your Memories experience, but making a regular habit of opening the Popsa app is essential too. If you haven’t turned on the app for a while, Memories gets blocked from seeing your new photos. Without being able to view your most recent moments, events and experiences, all those stories can’t be curated into an album. 

Download the Popsa app to activate Memories today and start building the story of your life.