Ending and replacing tokens

Covers how a live token is ended: released by the person carrying it, or switched off when it is gone. The two are not interchangeable, and which one is right depends on who is holding it.

Unlinking

Releasing a token is the owner’s act and nobody else’s. They open My tokens in their own Spherum card, pick the token and release it — the same place and the same single confirmation that linked it. There is no control in the Portal that releases somebody’s token, at any level, and archiving a person does not touch what they carry.

The token goes blank, not dead. From the next scan it shows what it showed before anybody linked it: not active, with an invitation for whoever ought to be linking it. Nothing of the previous holder stays behind it, and their card and any other token they carry are untouched.

Which is what makes a handover clean. A released token is an unlinked token, so the next person links it exactly as the first one did, and the moment they do it points at their contacts and nobody else’s.

Caution

A token that has gone missing is not unlinked. Blank is precisely the state in which whoever is holding it can link it to themselves, so releasing a lost token hands it to the finder. Switch it off instead.

Deactivating

Switching off is for a token nobody has in hand. Lost, stolen, or gone with somebody who has stopped answering. Anything that is not a handover to a named person is ended this way, not by releasing it.

The address behind the QR stops returning anything. A scan says the token is no longer active, and that is all it says. It cannot be linked either, so whoever picked it up gets neither the contacts nor a way to make it theirs.

The owner switches it off, from the same My tokens. There is no such control in the Portal for anybody — if the owner cannot do it themselves, tell us and we will switch the token off at your request.

Only support can turn it back on. Not the owner, not the company. It is not a pause: if the token turns up later, getting it working again is a conversation with us.

Note

The key the QR carries is printed on the object and is never reissued. A switched off token therefore cannot be given a new key and handed to somebody else — it stays off rather than going blank.

Issuing a replacement

A replacement is an ordinary handout from your stock. Give the person a new token and they link it, exactly as covered in Handing tokens out.

There is nothing to migrate. Contacts live with the person, not inside the token, so a new one shows the same contacts from the moment it is linked. No link between the old token and the new one is kept, and none is needed.

Switch the missing one off first, then hand out the new one. The other order works too — somebody can carry several tokens at once and they all show the same thing — but switching off a lost token is not worth postponing until a replacement is to hand.

Nothing to reconcile on the company side. The Portal still shows one thing: this person has a linked token. Which one it is, and how many they have been through, is a question nobody needs to ask.