In the app
Open Settings → Delete account. The app deletes the account itself: it asks you to confirm, and when you do, everything listed below goes. That is the route, and it is the one to use if you still have Cat & Seek installed.
By email
Email vickydarlinn@gmail.com with the subject “Delete my account”, from the email address you signed in with. That is the whole request — you do not need to give a reason, and we will not try to talk you out of it.
We will confirm by reply and complete the deletion within 30 days of establishing that the account is yours.
This route works whether or not you still have the app, which is why it stays here permanently: someone who has already uninstalled has no Settings screen to open, and their account is still on our server until they ask.
If you played as a guest
Settings → Delete account works for a guest too. A guest is a real account on our server, with real rows attached to it, so the in-app route deletes it exactly as it deletes a signed-in one. If you still have the app, use that.
Asking by email is harder, and it is worth knowing why. A guest account has no email address, no name and no photo. It is held together by a random identifier the app created on your device the first time you opened it, and we hold only a one-way hash of its secret — so there is nothing we can match an email against.
Write to vickydarlinn@gmail.com anyway and we will tell you exactly what we need to find the account. Please send the message from the device you played on if you still have it, and say roughly when you started playing and how far you got.
If you never signed in and you delete the app, the credential on your device goes with it. The account row stays on our server, unreachable by anyone, until it is deleted — so it is still worth asking.
What gets deleted
Everything below is removed outright, in a single operation:
- your sign-in identities — Google, Apple, or the guest credential;
- every game you played: each attempt, every cat placed and every wrong tap;
- your cleared levels, best results and hints used;
- your streak, every day recorded in it, and any streak freezes;
- your XP balance and every entry in the XP ledger;
- every notification we ever sent you, and the record of what happened to each one — delivered, shown, opened, dismissed;
- your notification settings;
- your push tokens and the device details attached to them (device name, model, OS version, app version);
- every product event the app sent to our own server about you. Copies other companies hold are not part of this list; they are under What is kept.
Your sign-in sessions are revoked, so every signed-in device is signed out.
We also delete your profile picture from our storage bucket. That one step is best-effort, and we would rather say so than promise it: if the storage provider refuses the delete, the rest of the deletion still completes and the failure is recorded in our logs rather than being retried. Say so in your email if you want it confirmed, and we will check and remove the file by hand.
If you signed in with Apple, we tell Apple too. Deleting your account revokes your Sign in with Apple grant, so Cat & Seek stops being listed under Settings → Apple ID → Sign in with Apple. We hold one Apple token for exactly that, we spend it as part of the deletion, and it is destroyed along with the rest of your sign-in identity. Like the picture, this step is best-effort: if Apple cannot be reached the deletion still completes, and you can remove the app from that list yourself in your Apple ID settings.
The rest of your user record — email address, name, username, picture address, country, time zone, last sign-in, XP balance and any entitlement — is wiped in place.
This cannot be undone. Deleting your sign-in identity is what makes it final: if you sign in again with the same Google or Apple account afterwards, we have no way to recognise it, and you get a brand-new, empty account.
What is kept, and why
Some things outlive the deletion, and it is fair to name all of them. Four are on our server. Four are at other companies.
On our server
A stub of your user record. After the wipe, what is left is an account identifier with no personal data attached to it, the date the account was created, and a marker that it was deleted. It exists so the identifier is never handed to anybody else and so we can prove the account was deleted if you ever ask. It contains nothing that identifies you.
Purchase and subscription records. If you ever bought anything, the record that money moved is kept — what was bought, when its state changed, the amount charged with its currency, the country of the store that charged it, and the store’s own receipt reference. It carries no name, email address or other direct identifier. We keep it where the law requires it, and to prevent fraud and abuse.
The store’s country is the one piece of geography that survives a deletion, and it is worth saying why rather than leaving you to notice: it is the pricing and tax territory of the financial record, which is the ground the record stands on. The country on your own profile is wiped with everything else. (Today no purchase is possible in Cat & Seek, so for now there is nothing in this category to keep.)
Sign-in session records. These hold the IP address and user agent captured when you signed in. They are revoked immediately, so none of them can be used again, and then they expire from our cache on their own rather than being deleted row by row.
Google’s confirmations of rewarded ads. From version 1.1, when Google confirmed that you watched an ad for XP, our server recorded it. The deletion removes your account identifier from those records. What stays is Google’s transaction number, the ad unit, the reward, the time and a random claim number. Once the identifier is gone, nothing in them points back to you. We keep them to check that ad rewards add up.
At other companies
These copies are not part of the deletion above, and deleting your account does not remove them on its own. Write to vickydarlinn@gmail.com and say which ones you want removed. We will do what is described for each. Nothing here happens automatically.
Crash reports. These are held by Sentry under its own retention schedule rather than in our database. A crash report carries your account identifier but no email address, no username and no device name — the fields that would identify you are stripped before the report leaves your phone. If you ask, we will ask Sentry to delete them.
Google Analytics. From version 1.1, the events Google Analytics received carry your account identifier. They stay in our Google Analytics property until its retention setting removes them. If you ask, we will ask Google to delete the data for your account identifier.
Tenjin. Tenjin’s records are about your phone, not your account, so they carry no account identifier. If you ask, we will ask Tenjin to delete them. We may need some details from you to find your phone in their records.
Google AdMob. Google keeps what its ads library collected under Google’s own privacy policy, and we cannot delete it for you. You can turn off tracking for this app, or for every app, in your iPhone’s settings. The Privacy Policy explains what each of these companies receives.
Because of the stub row, this is properly called pseudonymisation, not complete erasure. We would rather say that than claim more than we do.
Before you confirm, the in-app screen names what is destroyed and the payment record that is kept. “Everything is erased forever” would be false.
Deleting the app is not deleting your account
Removing Cat & Seek from your phone stops the app running. It does not tell our server anything, and it does not delete your account. Use the route above.
If you also have an active subscription, deleting your account does not cancel it — subscriptions are managed by Apple. Turn off auto-renewal in your Apple ID settings.
Something else you want removed?
You can ask for a copy of your data, or ask us to correct it, instead of deleting everything. Same address: vickydarlinn@gmail.com. See the Privacy Policy for the full list of what we hold.
For reference when you write to us, the app’s identifier is {BUNDLE_ID}.