Data Retention
Traveler Identity Service (TIS) is built to hold biometric data only as long as a deployment's purpose and the applicable law require — no longer. Retention is a configurable, whitelabel capability: the platform provides the controls, and each government or integrator sets the actual periods to meet its own regulation. No retention period is fixed in the product, and no country-specific limit is embedded.
What is governed
Retention applies to two kinds of biometric artifact, classified by how they are used:
| Biometric template (held by the ABIS matcher) | Raw image (held by TIS) | |
|---|---|---|
| Enrollment — e.g. eVisa or traveler enrollment | Enrollment template | Raw enrollment image |
| Live check — an identification / verification at a border touchpoint | Probe template | Captured raw image |
Each of these is governed by its own retention window, set independently. The retention of the Encounter and its audit trail — the permanent record that an interaction happened — is separate and is not covered here.
How retention is configured
Every window is a deployment setting. Conceptually, each can be configured to:
- Delete immediately once the data is no longer needed for the operation,
- Retain for a fixed period, then delete, or
- Retain indefinitely, where regulation requires all data to be kept.
The default posture is data minimization — retain each artifact for the shortest window the deployment's regulation allows. Live-check captures in particular are kept to a minimum; the lasting record that a check happened is the Encounter audit trail, not the image.
Soft-delete and restore
The raw enrollment image is the durable source of record. Removing a traveler's template from the matcher (a soft-delete) makes the traveler no longer matchable, but the enrollment can be restored by re-deriving the template from the retained image. A full erasure removes the source image itself and permanently invalidates the derived template.
Who sets the periods
Retention periods are chosen by the government or integrator to satisfy its own regulation — the platform ships the controls, not the numbers. Deployments commonly align periods with frameworks such as the EU Entry/Exit System (EES), ETIAS, the Visa Information System (VIS), national travel-authorization schemes, and GDPR. The authoritative regulation always governs; any framework reference must be confirmed against its own text before a deployment adopts it.
See also
- What Traveler Identity Service does — and what it doesn't — scope and boundaries
- Galleries & Watchlists — how identification scope is segmented
- Encounter — the interaction record, retained under its own policy