Data deletion instructions

If you are a member of a toy library

Your membership records — your household, your loans, your payments, and anything recorded about your children — belong to your toy library. It decides what it keeps and for how long, and we hold those records for it. So a request to delete them goes to your library, not to us: ask its volunteers, and they can remove or anonymise your records.

What you can ask us to delete is what we hold about you in your own right: the sign-in identity attached to your email address, and the name and profile picture a Google or Facebook sign-in passed to us. Email [email protected] from the address on your account with the subject "Delete my data". We will confirm your request and act on it within 30 days.

If you signed in with Facebook or Google

Signing in that way shares only your name, email address, and profile picture with ToyHive. To disconnect ToyHive from your social account, remove it in that platform's settings (on Facebook: Settings & Privacy → Settings → Apps and Websites). Then send us a deletion request as above and we will erase the profile details we received.

Deleting Meta data a library connected

Where a library has connected its Facebook or Instagram page, log in to the library account, go to Settings > Social posting, and select "Disconnect". This immediately severs the connection: nothing further is published, and the stored Page access tokens are never used again. You can also remove ToyHive's access from Facebook's own Settings & Privacy → Settings → Apps and Websites, which revokes the token at Meta's end immediately.

If you run a toy library and want to close its account

Export the library's records first, from Settings > Danger zone — once the account is deleted you can no longer run that export yourself, though for 30 days after deletion you can ask us for one. Closing an account is two steps there: archive the library, then delete it.

Deleting it ends the subscription, and fees already paid for the current year are not refunded — see our terms of service. The records are then retained for 30 days, during which we can restore them if the library asks, and are afterwards irreversibly anonymised.

Members' names, contact details, addresses, children's records, waivers, saved cards and volunteer credential numbers are removed or overwritten, and each volunteer is unlinked from the library. Operational history such as loan counts remains with no name attached, and the messages ToyHive sent keep only the delivery record. We do not keep a key that puts the names back. Our own records of the library — its billing contact, its invoices, and its acceptance of our terms — are kept for as long as the law requires.

Backups and records we must keep

We keep daily database backups for 7 days, so a backup taken before a deletion ages out within a week of it. Backups exist to recover the service from a failure and are not a way to retrieve deleted records. Where the law requires us to keep something — payment records for tax purposes, for example — we keep it for as long as the law requires and no longer.

See our privacy policy for how we handle personal information generally.