Walkthroughs

Step-by-step guides for the common tasks. Each one links out to the reference page for the concepts behind it. New here? Start with Getting Started for the big picture, then come back and work through these in order.

In this guide: First-time setup · Enrol a profile · Connect an NVR & cameras · Respond to an alert · Invite your team · Set retention · Run a manual search · Join Pariah Intel

First-time setup

Get from a new account to a live first site. Who: the account owner.

1. Create your account. Sign up on the web and verify your email. Onboarding then checks your company against Companies House — facial recognition is operator-only, so this keeps the platform to genuine businesses.

2. Choose a plan. Pick the tier that fits your estate. You can change it later. See Billing & Tiers.

3. Create your first site. A site is a venue or location; everything operational is scoped to one. Add its name and address. See your estate.

4. Add an NVR device. Under the site, add an NVR device — you'll get a claim token the on-site client uses to register. Keep it handy for the NVR walkthrough.

5. Accept the legal terms and activate. An owner/admin accepts the Terms, DPA, and Acceptable Use Policy, and you confirm a card on file to start your trial. Your Facebase starts empty — filling it is next.

Before you process anyone, you must have a lawful basis, a completed DPIA, and clear signage. See Compliance.

Enrol a profile

Add someone to your watchlist so they can be recognised. Who: security ops / admin.

1. Create the profile. In Facebase, choose New profile. Enter a name, set ban status to Active, and — if the ban is time-limited — a ban expiry date. Add notes that help staff act appropriately.

2. Enrol a face. Upload a clear, front-facing photo in good light. Add more than one good image of the same person to improve reliability. The platform prepares each image for matching automatically.

3. Review and save. Confirm the enrolled faces, status, and any sites the ban applies to. Only active profiles are matched on-site; once a ban ends, the biometric data is erased on your retention schedule. Keep entries lawful, proportionate, and current.

Connect an NVR & cameras

Put recognition on the ground at a site. Who: admin + whoever sets up the on-site machine. Full detail: NVR & Cameras.

1. Register the device. Install the NVR client on the on-site machine and register it with the claim token from setup. It appears under the site you added it to.

2. Add your cameras. Point the client at each camera's RTSP stream — usually a substream with enough resolution for recognition at a stable frame rate:

rtsp://user:pass@camera-ip:554/stream

3. Confirm it's healthy. The device should report online with a recent heartbeat and your cameras listed. Recognition now runs locally — only matches are sent to the platform, where they become alerts. Tune match sensitivity to your cameras.

Respond to an alert

The day-to-day loop: a match fires, you review it, and you record what happened. Who: frontline + security ops. Full detail: Alerts & Incidents.

1. See the alert. Matches push to the dashboard and the mobile app in real time, for staff assigned to that site.

2. Review before acting. A match is a probability, not a fact. Compare the snapshot with the enrolled image, check the confidence and the profile notes, then acknowledge to record that it was handled.

3. Raise an incident if something happened. Escalate to an incident to keep a durable record — the alert's context carries over.

4. Add evidence; hold if needed. Link the relevant detections, attach photos and notes, and — if the record may be needed for a dispute or proceeding — place it on legal hold to exempt it from retention until you release it.

Invite your team

Bring staff in with the right access. Who: owner / security ops. Background: Roles & Permissions.

1. Send an invite. From Team, invite by email and set a role at invite time — assign the least privilege each person needs. They receive an email to set a password and join.

2. Assign sites. Assign each member to the sites they cover — alerts follow these assignments, so a member only sees what's relevant to them.

Set retention

Decide how long each kind of data is kept — a core part of staying proportionate. Who: owner. Background: Compliance → Retention.

1. Open Data Retention. Go to Settings → Data Retention. Set a window in days for each data class; 0 means keep forever.

2. Set a deliberate biometric window. Biometric profiles controls how long face data is kept after a ban ends (expires or is revoked) — active and perpetual bans are never auto-erased. 0 is not a defensible default here, so set a real number per your retention schedule. Erasure from live systems is prompt; encrypted backups age out separately (up to 180 days).

Run a manual search (mobile)

A one-off lookup of a face against your watchlist, from the floor. Who: frontline. Background: Mobile App · Facebase.

1. Capture a face. In the mobile app's manual lookup, take or choose a photo of the person.

2. Read the results. You get ranked candidate matches with a similarity indicator. This uses cloud search and counts toward your monthly quota (continuous on-site detection does not). Treat results as probabilistic and apply judgement.

Join Pariah Intel

Optionally share and receive watchlist intelligence across venues. Who: owner / security ops. Full detail: Pariah Intel.

1. Read the explainer. Open Pariah Intel and work through the explainer and agreement — why it exists, the safeguards, and what joining means. It only takes effect once you've reviewed it and explicitly opted in.

2. Choose what you share. Set Contribute and Receive independently — enable one, both, or neither, and change it anytime. Contribution is profile-by-profile and evidence-gated; you remain the controller for anything you contribute.