What happens when you delete your account

When you ask us to delete your account, we erase you. One narrow category of record is kept, and this page says plainly which and why, because a policy you have to discover later is not much of a policy.

What is erased

• your name and email address;
• your phone number, including every verification code we ever sent to it, and the flag saying the number was confirmed;
• your profile picture — from the database and from disk;
• your display name and bio;
• your ability to sign in.

Backups expire on their own normal schedule, so a copy can persist there briefly until it rolls off.

What is kept: records of payments

If you ever paid for something, the record of that payment stays. Tax and accounting rules require a business to keep a record of money it received and money it paid — how much, and when — and that obligation does not end because an account was closed.

What stays is the transaction, not you. The payment record is disconnected from your name and your email address; what remains attached to it is an internal reference number, which exists so the accounts still add up. After a deletion, our records can show that a payment of a certain amount happened on a certain date. They cannot show that it was you.

This is also written in the Privacy Policy.

If you have not paid for anything

Then there is no financial record to keep, and nothing of yours remains.

Why we tell you this instead of staying quiet

The honest position is more useful than a promise of total erasure that the accounts department cannot keep. If you would like a copy of your content before you go, ask through the contact page.