Delete your account

From inside the app

This is the fastest way, and it needs nobody’s help: open Profile and scroll to the bottom, where Delete account sits. The app asks you to confirm, and spells out what is about to go. Deletion is immediate and cannot be undone.

Without the app

If you have uninstalled the app, lost access to the device, or cannot sign in, email us and we will delete the account for you.

So we can find the right account and be sure it is yours, please send the request from the email address you used to sign in, and tell us the display name shown on your profile.

We only ever delete an account on a request we can tie to it. If you write from a different address we will have to ask you some questions first, which is slower for you and is the reason for the note above. We do not ask for your password, and we could not use it if you sent one: signing in happens entirely through Google and we never see it.

What gets deleted

Deleting your account reaches further than your own profile, because you cannot own riddles you are no longer there to answer for. It permanently removes:

• Your account and everything stored about you — your display name, your email address, your profile picture address, the provider you signed in with and the identifier it gave you.
• Every riddle you created, with its solution, hints, tags, images and any multiple-choice answers.
• Every location you created, including its coordinates and image.
• Your History, Statistics, ratings and favourites.
• Other players’ ratings, view history and timed attempts on the riddles you created — a rating of a riddle that no longer exists means nothing.

What does not get deleted

• Riddles you rated but did not write. They belong to their own creators and stay. Your individual ratings are removed, and the riddles’ average scores are recalculated without them.
• A bespoke riddle tied only to one of your locations. It is not yours, so it is not deleted — it becomes orphaned, and its own creator can re-home it at another location. This is the same thing that happens whenever a location is deleted.
• A report you filed that players are still voting on. It carries on to a conclusion rather than evaporating with your account, because the objection was about the content, not about you. It is no longer linked to you and you are not named in it.

How long it takes to be gone everywhere

Deletion is immediate in the app and on our servers — the moment it is done, the account and its content are no longer there for anyone. Backups take a little longer. We keep fourteen days of nightly database backups and seven days of transaction logs so that a failure on our side can be undone rather than lost, and a deleted image file is recoverable for seven days for the same reason. What you deleted can therefore still exist inside those copies for up to fourteen days before they age out. They are encrypted, nobody reads them in the ordinary course of things, and we do not use them to restore anything somebody asked us to delete.

If you only want to remove something you posted

You do not have to delete your whole account to take down one riddle or one location — each has its own delete action in the app, and deleting a location does not delete the riddles other people tied to it. If something needs removing and you cannot do it yourself, write to us with the item’s identifier, which you can copy by tapping the ID under its title.