Delete your account

Two ways to do it

In the app

1. Open Bounty Go and go to Settings.
2. Scroll to the bottom and choose Delete account.
3. Read the two confirmations and confirm. The deletion is scheduled the moment you do.

By email, without the app

You do not need the app installed, or even a working device, to have your account deleted. Email [email protected] with the subject Delete my account, from the address on your account. If you signed in with Apple and used Hide My Email, write from the private relay address, or tell us your handle so we can find you.

Include your handle, the one starting with an at sign in your profile, if you know it. We may ask one question to confirm the account is yours, which exists to stop somebody else deleting your account, and we will not ask for a password, a card number or a copy of an identity document.

We acknowledge the request within two business days and schedule the deletion when we do. From that point it behaves exactly like the in-app route, including the 30 day window.

What happens immediately

• Every session is revoked, so you are signed out on every device.
• Your listings stop being visible on the map.
• Your profile stops being reachable by other users, and you disappear from other people's views of shared claims and sightings.
• Your scores leave the runner's weekly board.
• No further notifications are sent to you.

The 30 day window

Deletion is scheduled, not instant, and the gap is deliberate. For 30 days the account sits marked for deletion and invisible to everyone. Sign in again at any point in that window and the deletion is cancelled and the account comes back exactly as it was, listings included.

That is the only way back. There is no other undo, and once the window has passed we cannot restore anything, because there is nothing left to restore.

Cancel your subscription yourself, before or after you delete. Posting is free now, and the monthly subscription that used to keep listings on the map is no longer sold. If you still pay for one, deleting your Bounty Go account does not cancel it. The subscription is a contract between you and Apple or Google, and only you can end it: open Subscriptions in your App Store or Google Play account settings, find Bounty Go, and cancel. Until you do, the store keeps charging you every month for an account you can no longer sign in to, and we cannot stop it from our side. Boosts are one-off purchases and have nothing to cancel. Deleting also does not refund a purchase you have already made. Refunds are Apple's and Google's to give, under their own policies.

What is erased

Once the window passes, a job removes the account and everything that hangs off it:

• Your name, handle, email address, avatar, any phone number on the account, the identifier your Apple or Google sign-in was linked by, and the password hash if you registered with a password.
• Every listing you published, with its description, its photos and its locations, both the true one and the published one.
• Every sighting you reported, including its note, its photos and its coordinates.
• Claims you were part of and the messages inside them.
• Your uploaded photos, in the object store as well as the database.
• Push tokens, notification history and notification preferences.
• Experience points, levels, streaks, check ins, shares, challenges and cosmetic items.
• Your runs in the runner, your best score in each week, and whether you chose to show your handle on its board.
• Blocks you set, and blocks other people set against you.
• Sessions and sign-in state.

What is kept, and why

Up to three things survive, and we would rather be plain about them than let you discover it later.

Accounts with payment history are anonymised rather than removed

If you ever paid for a subscription or a boost, that payment record has to be retained: tax law requires it, and a chargeback or a store dispute can arrive months after the fact and has to be answerable. A payment row cannot exist without the account row it points at, so instead of removing the account we strip it.

Everything identifying is cleared: name, handle, email, phone, avatar, the Apple and Google sign-in identifiers, the password hash, and the fuzzed home area. What is left is a row with an identifier and nothing else in it, kept only so the financial record it anchors remains valid. It cannot be signed in to, it is not reachable by anyone, and it cannot be turned back into you.

A listing that a payment points at is kept the same way: the row survives as an identifier, a category and a date, and its title, description, attributes, photos, reward and locations are all cleared. It is off the map and cannot be opened by anyone.

An audit log of identifiers

Significant actions on the service are recorded in an audit log that is kept for seven years, for fraud investigation and for legal defence. It stores identifiers and what happened, not names, email addresses, message content or coordinates.

A note that your address bounced or reported our email as spam

If an email we sent your address bounced because the address did not exist, or you marked one of our emails as spam, we keep a note of it so we do not email that address again. The note is a keyed fingerprint of the address, not the address, with the kind of report, its date and Amazon's reference for the report, and it names no account. It stays after the account is gone because it is about the mailbox: without it, a new account on the same address would be emailed by a sender that was told to stop. A bounce is forgotten after a year; a spam report is kept until you ask us to lift it, by writing to support from that address.

One thing that is not ours to delete

Receipts for anything you bought are held by Apple or Google under their own policies. Ask them if you want those removed.

Messages you sent inside a claim are erased with the account, on the same day as everything else, and the other person's copy of the conversation loses them too. The 90 day retention in the Privacy Policy is the rule for messages between two live accounts; deleting yours cuts it short.

How long it takes

If you want less than deletion

Deleting the account is not the only option, and it is the one you cannot take back.

• Pause or delete a single listing from your listings screen.
• Turn notifications off, or choose which kinds you get, in Settings inside the app or in your phone's settings.
• Revoke location permission in your device settings. The app keeps working, with a map you have to move yourself.
• Block a specific person, which does not require you to leave.
• Ask us for a copy of your data instead, which you are entitled to under the Privacy Policy.

Questions

[email protected], and a person answers.

See also: Privacy Policy · Terms of Service · Support