Payphone Tag is run by Alex Allchin (al3x.au). This page explains how to delete the data tied to your Payphone Tag account.

Payphone Tag uses pseudonymous accounts keyed by a system-generated 5-digit PIN. No email, no real name, no traditional login. If you want everything tied to your PIN removed, follow the steps below.

How to request deletion

Email [email protected] with:

• Your 5-digit PIN (so we can find the right record), and
• Your callsign (as a sanity check — helps confirm you're deleting your own account and not someone else's).

Any email address is fine — we have no record of one. If you've lost your PIN, include your callsign and approximate date you started playing so we can find you.

→ Email [email protected]

Timeline

We action deletion requests within 7 days. You'll get a short confirmation email when it's done.

What gets deleted

• Your PIN — scrubbed from the database (replaced with a non-identifying placeholder so referential integrity survives).
• Your callsign, emoji, colour, and profile slug — blanked out. The callsign and emoji return to the pool for new players.
• Push notification subscriptions — fully deleted. You'll stop receiving notifications immediately.
• Badges — deleted.
• Your public profile page (/p/<slug>) — becomes 404. Search engines typically drop it within days to weeks.

What is retained (and why it's anonymous)

The items below contain no personal information after the scrub, so we retain them indefinitely:

• Capture log entries — the records of which payphones were captured and when stay in the database, attached to your now-scrubbed (anonymous) row. The rows themselves contain no personal information — just a payphone ID and a timestamp. We keep them so the game's historical state (triangles, territory, leaderboard snapshots from when you were playing) doesn't break retroactively. Nothing in them identifies you.
• Call log entries — retained for fraud detection on the payphone side. These contain the payphone's own Australian phone number, not yours, and the player_id points at your scrubbed (anonymous) row.
• Aggregate stats — totals like "N captures at this payphone across all time" — are derived from the anonymous capture log, so they continue to work but no longer name you.

Accounts with zero captures

If you registered but never captured a payphone, your account is auto-purged after 3 days without you needing to email. This is the default for throwaway signups.

Active players (with at least one capture) are retained indefinitely unless you request deletion.

What if I want to start over?

You don't need to delete your account to do this — just register again to get a new PIN, callsign, and emoji. Your old account will auto-purge if you abandon it before capturing, or linger as a dormant record otherwise. If the old record has captures and you want it gone, email us per the steps above.

Questions

See the full privacy policy for what we collect in the first place, or email [email protected] with anything else.

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