Deleting it from inside the app
Open Magpeye and sign in. Tap You, at the right of the bar along the bottom. Tap Settings. Scroll to the very last section, Delete this account.
You are asked to type the word DELETE before the button does anything. That is deliberate. It is the one control in Magpeye that cannot be undone by changing it back, and a control like that should be harder to press by accident than a switch you can flick twice.
If you cannot sign in
Email support@magpeye.app and ask for the account to be deleted. A person reads it and does the same thing the button does.
Send it from the email address the account uses if you possibly can, because that is what makes it quick. If you cannot — the address is gone, or it was never yours — say so, tell us the address the account was made with and the name or handle it used, and we will ask you something only the account holder would be able to answer.
We may refuse if we cannot establish that the account is yours. That is not obstructiveness: deleting somebody’s records because a stranger asked is the worse failure of the two, and the UK GDPR allows us to ask for what we reasonably need to confirm who you are before we act.
If you are a parent or carer asking about a child’s account, say that in the same email. We will not ask a child to prove anything to us.
What is deleted
Everything Magpeye holds about you and everything you put into it. Named individually, because a list is worth more than the word “everything”:
Your profile — display name, handle, bio, picture, home region, date of birth and every setting on it. Your sightings, with their dates, their coordinates and their notes. Your bird walks and their tracks. Your collection, your badges, your metals, your XP, your level, your streak and your quest progress. Every photograph you uploaded, both the ones of birds and any you used as a profile picture, deleted from storage rather than merely unlinked. Your friendships, your groups, your parties, your battles, your wishlist, and every clue you have sent or received. Any trade still open is cancelled, and your event cards go with the account. Your notifications. The record of which documents you accepted, and when.
Your sign-in record — the email address and password held by our authentication provider — is the one part removed by a person rather than by the app. Magpeye deliberately holds no key that can delete an authentication record, because an app that can delete its own accounts can be made to delete somebody else’s. That step is done by hand, and it is the reason the timing below is what it is.
There is no undo and no restore. Nothing is archived “just in case”. If you change your mind, you have until it is finished, and the way to say so is to email the address above.
What is kept, for how long, and why
Reports made about the account. If somebody reported you, that report survives the deletion with the account identifier stripped out of it. A single report is not a pattern, and a pattern is exactly what deleting an account and making a new one is meant to hide. Article 17(3) of the UK GDPR allows this, for legal obligations and for the establishment of legal claims. Reports you made about other people are kept on the same footing, and for the same reason.
Conservation records, if you switched that on. The conservation export carries the observation and never the observer: a species, a date, a region and a coordinate rounded to about a kilometre, with no account identifier in it and no way to join it back to you. That is what makes it safe to share, and it is also why it cannot be picked back out once it has gone. If you would rather your sightings were not in it, turn the setting off before you delete the account, or say so in the email and we will exclude them.
Technical logs kept by our providers. Supabase and Vercel keep their own request logs — IP addresses, timings, error traces — and their own database backups. These are short-lived by design and roll off on the providers’ schedule rather than ours. We do not read them for anything other than keeping the service up, and we cannot reach into a backup to remove one row from it.
Nothing else. There is no shadow copy, no “deleted accounts” table, no marketing list. Magpeye has no advertising, no analytics and no trackers of any kind, so there is no profile of you anywhere else to go and delete.
How long it takes
The moment you press the button, you stop existing as far as every other account is concerned. Your handle, your picture and your bio are gone, your friendships end, you leave every group and party, your clues are deleted and open trades are cancelled. That part is immediate and nobody has to do anything for it to happen.
The last step — the sign-in record — is finished within one calendar month, which is the limit the UK GDPR sets, and usually a great deal sooner than that. There is no scheduled job anywhere in Magpeye and nothing runs on a timer, so we would rather tell you that a person does it than imply a machine has already finished.
If you want to be told when it is done, ask in the same message and we will write back.
If you want something less than deletion
You do not have to delete the account to stop sharing. The social layer has its own switch and turning it off ends every feature that involves another person. Being findable by handle has another. Any single sighting can be hidden, which takes it off every community surface while it still counts towards your own collection. All three are in Settings, and all three can be changed back, which deletion cannot.
You can also ask us for a copy of everything we hold about you, or to correct something that is wrong, at the same address. There is no charge and we answer within one calendar month.