Delete your Coffee Dictionary account

Service: Coffee Dictionary (website and mobile apps)

Data controller (GDPR): Burak Altıntaş, Antalya/Turkey

You can delete your Coffee Dictionary account yourself in the app or on the website, or ask us to delete it by e-mail. Deleting erases your personal data, such as your e-mail address, nickname and profile photo, immediately. What you wrote stays, under the name “Deleted user”. You can sign up again later with the same address, but that creates a new, empty account. This page explains each way to delete and exactly what is erased, kept and shown.

1) In the app

Open the Coffee Dictionary app and tap Profile in the bottom bar (it shows your profile photo if you have one). If you are not signed in, sign in with the e-mail address of your account.
Scroll down to Account Actions and tap Delete Account.
Confirm with Delete.

2) On the website

Open coffeedictionary.com/profile and sign in with the e-mail address of your account; a sign-in code is sent to that address.
On the Profile page, under Account Actions, click Delete Account.
Confirm in the window that opens.

3) By e-mail

Write to info@coffeedictionary.com from the e-mail address of your account and ask for the account to be deleted. Writing from that address shows us that the account is yours.

We then delete the account in our admin panel. It is erased in the same way as when you delete it yourself, as described below.

4) What happens when the account is deleted

Whether you delete the account in the app or on the website, or a Coffee Dictionary administrator deletes it with the admin panel’s Delete button after confirming, the account is erased immediately, in a single database transaction. Section 5 lists what is erased, section 6 what is kept.

Administrators cannot delete an account by changing its status in the admin panel’s edit dialog; our server refuses that.

5) What is erased

The following is deleted from our database:

E-mail address and nickname: replaced with placeholders that identify nobody.
Profile photo: the link to the photo is cleared. Right after the erasure, every photo file the account ever uploaded is deleted from our file storage, not only the current one, because earlier photos were never removed. If the storage fails at that moment, the files stay at their old public address until we delete them by hand; the failure is logged.
Account details: your preferred language, the time you last signed in and any note an administrator wrote about you.
Role: an editor or administrator role is removed, and the history of your role changes is deleted.
Daily e-mail and daily push notification: both are turned off.
Sessions: all sessions on all devices are deleted, including the IP address and the device or browser stored with them. Any access token a device still holds stops working immediately, so you are signed out everywhere.
Sign-in codes sent to your address.
Push notification tokens of your devices, and the records of push notifications still waiting for a delivery receipt.
App installations that newer app versions registered to your account: their push token, platform, version, language, time zone, notification choices and the time of your news consent, and the records of notification campaigns sent to them.
Delivery history: the history of the daily e-mail, the weekly and monthly e-mails and the daily push notification.
Event participation: your RSVPs (“Going”, “Interested”, “Maybe”). The counts on the events drop accordingly.
Requests for a @coffeedictionary.com address. If one was approved, the administrators receive an e-mail with that address so they can remove the mailbox.
Suggestions sent from your address: the name and address on them are removed; their text is kept.
Events you suggested: the nickname and address copied into them are removed; the event is kept.
Requests sent just before the deletion: a sign-in, a device’s push notification token, an RSVP, an event suggestion, an address request or a profile photo sent in that moment is not stored once the erasure has gone through; the photo file of such an upload is deleted again. A comment written in that moment is kept like your other comments, under “Deleted user”. A term suggestion is not linked to your account: one that arrives after the erasure keeps the name and address it was sent with.

6) What is kept

The following is kept:

Comments you wrote.
Comments you had deleted yourself stay hidden from the public. Their text is kept, as for every deleted comment, and administrators can still read it in the admin panel and its export, under “Deleted user” (see section 7).
Dictionary terms you created or edited. They stay attributed to your account, which is shown as “Deleted user”.
The text of your term suggestions.
Events you suggested, including whatever was typed into them (for example the contact field).
Images you uploaded for terms or events.
The record of which user agreement you accepted, linked to the anonymous account.
An anonymous account record: an internal random ID, your category (Coffee Lover, Home Brewer or Coffee Professional), the date the account was created and the date it was deleted. It holds no name, address, photo or setting. The contributions that are kept stay linked to one another through this anonymous ID.

7) How a deleted account is shown

Wherever an author is shown, a deleted account appears under a fixed name, with no photo and no role badge. This covers comments, event creators, suggestions, the administrators’ lists and the admin export. Our server gives that name in the language it is asked for: “Deleted user” in English, “Gelöschtes Konto” in German, “Silinmiş kullanıcı” in Turkish. The admin panel asks for no language, so it and its export always show the English “Deleted user”.

In the admin panel’s user list and user details, a deleted account appears as “Deleted user” with a placeholder address of the form deleted+<ID>@deleted.invalid and the role “user”. It shows no photo, note, language or last sign-in, and the daily e-mail and the daily push notification are off. It can be found by its ID only, not by its old address or nickname.

8) Signing up again

The same e-mail address can sign up again at any time. This creates a brand-new, empty account: a new ID, the normal user role, no photo, default settings and no history.

Nothing of the old account comes back; what it wrote stays under “Deleted user”. A deleted account cannot be restored, not even by an administrator.

The old nickname becomes free for anyone.

If an account deleted earlier (see section 11) still has that address, it is erased first, as described on this page; the new account is then created if the sign-up goes through.

9) What deleting does not erase

Deleting the account does not reach the following:

Photo files left behind by a storage error, until we delete them by hand (see section 5).
Copies of your profile photo that browsers, proxies or Google’s storage cache have already fetched. Photos were served publicly and could be cached for one year.
Earlier versions of photo files, if our file storage keeps earlier versions of files.
Server logs, which hold IP addresses and, in some lines, the e-mail address, until their retention period ends (30 days by default).
The app on your device: if it stays installed, it registers again as an installation without an account, known only by the hash of its install ID (see section 10.4 of the privacy policy). App usage statistics name no account and are deleted after 8 days.
Database backups, until they age out.
E-mails that were already delivered.
Data held by service providers: our e-mail provider, Expo (which sends the app’s push notifications) and Apple’s and Google’s push services.
Personal details you typed into comments, suggestions or events; they stay as written.

10) Notice to the administrators

When an editor’s account is deleted, or any account that had an approved @coffeedictionary.com address, the administrators receive an e-mail with the display name, the registered e-mail address, the user ID, who deleted the account and the approved @coffeedictionary.com address, if there was one. That e-mail stays in the administrators’ mailboxes.

11) Accounts deleted earlier

Previously, deleting an account only deactivated it and kept its data. Accounts deleted that way are shown as described in section 7 on comments, in the admin export and in the admin panel’s user list and user details.

Until our one-time cleanup has erased them, the events and suggestions they sent still show the name and address copied into them, the admin panel’s RSVP and address-request lists still show them, their RSVPs still count, and their data and photo files are still stored.

12) Your rights

Your rights over your data, including deletion, are set out in section 10.6 of the user agreement. For any request about your data, write to info@coffeedictionary.com.