The question we hear most from police chiefs, casino compliance officers and hospital security directors is a simple one. What is actually in the database?

UMbRA, the law-enforcement-sourced identity database, is the record set behind every Safience alert. It holds 58.4M+ records and adds tens of thousands of new arrest and booking records every day. The live count is on the UMbRA identity database page.

What goes in

Every record comes from a law-enforcement or criminal-justice source. The categories are:

• Booking and arrest records
• Convictions
• Felony warrants
• Sex-offender registrations
• Probation and parole records
• Missing-persons reports

That is the whole list.

What never goes in

No social media. No news photos. No credit files. No consumer, marketing or commercial data. No images scraped from the open web. No video from any facility we serve.

This is a deliberate limit, not a gap we plan to fill. A record that came from a law-enforcement process has a known origin, a date and an agency behind it. A photo pulled from a public profile has none of that, and treating it as evidence is how innocent people end up arrested. We wrote about two recent cases in Identity intelligence starts with a record, not a face.

Who can search it

Not the public, and not our commercial customers. Direct search is limited to credentialed law-enforcement users, with role-based access and an audit trail on every query.

A casino, hospital or bank never browses the database. It receives an alert only when a person on its premises matches a record that is relevant to that site, and only after a trained analyst has reviewed the match.

What happens to everything else

When an image captured at a facility does not match a relevant record, it is deleted immediately. No biometric template is stored. Nobody builds a history of who walked through the door.

Why this matters

Identity technology is only as trustworthy as its source data. A larger database built from anything that can be found online is not a better database. It is a less accountable one. We would rather be able to answer, for every single record, where it came from.

Questions about how the database handles personal data can go to our privacy team through the privacy page.

Featured photo by MIKE STOLL on Unsplash.