Delete your Magpie account

Magpie is a podcast and article player for iPhone, iPad and Android, developed by Henry Dashwood. This page explains how to delete your Magpie account and the data held with it, and what, if anything, is kept afterwards. You do not need to reinstall the app to do this.

Delete your account in the app

The account is the same on every device, so deleting it on one phone deletes it everywhere. Deletion happens straight away; you do not need to contact us or wait for us to act.

1. Open Magpie and sign in, if you are not signed in already.
2. Go to the Settings tab.
3. In the Account section, choose Delete Account.
4. Magpie asks “Delete your account?”. Choose Delete Account again to confirm, or Cancel to keep it.

These steps are the same on iPhone, iPad and Android. Magpie then signs you out on that device.

If you cannot use the app

Email hcndashwood@gmail.com with the subject “Delete my Magpie account”. Please write from the email address you signed in to Magpie with — the address on your Apple or Google account, or, if you hid your email with Apple, tell us which Apple ID you used — so that we can find the right account and confirm the request comes from you. Email requests are handled by hand, and we will act on them promptly and reply once the account has been deleted.

What is deleted

• Your account, including your email address and sign-in details.
• Every linked Apple and Google sign-in identity, and all sign-in tokens. Where an Apple connection is present, Magpie also asks Apple to revoke it.
• The shows and publications you follow, and your place in every episode and article.
• Articles you saved, including your private copies of their text.
• Your newsletter address, and every newsletter feed, issue and message received through it.
• Records of your recent voice requests kept to prevent duplicates and allow undo, and your AI data-sharing choice.
• The only link between your account and the random code used to label diagnostic records.

What is kept, and for how long

• Diagnostic records — the pseudonymous records of recent requests described in the privacy policy — stay only under their random code, no longer connected to any account in Magpie's live database, and are deleted after 30 days. Because a spoken request is free text, its words could still identify you if you said something identifying. Our server's operational logs, which can include search terms you typed and, in a few lines, your random diagnostic code, are likewise deleted after 30 days.
• Database backups taken before the deletion may still hold a copy of your data until they expire. Backups are never kept longer than 30 days and are used only to restore the service.
• OpenAI, if you allowed AI data sharing, may keep requests it received in abuse-monitoring logs for up to 30 days under its own terms.
• Shared podcast and publication listings — the public feeds and episodes that other people also follow — are not personal data and stay in Magpie's catalogue.

Data stored on your device, such as downloaded article text, is cleared when Magpie signs you out. Uninstalling the app removes everything else it kept on that device.

More information

See the privacy policy for everything Magpie collects and why, or the support page for help with the app.