Delete your Where account

There are two ways to delete your Where account. Both delete the same things, and the privacy policy is the full account of what that means.

In the app

Open your own profile, tap the settings icon, and find Delete account under Account. It takes effect immediately; you do not need to contact us.

By email, without the app

If you cannot open the app — you have uninstalled it, lost the device, or cannot sign in — write to privacy-where@googlegroups.com from the email address you used to sign in, and ask us to delete your account. We will confirm, delete it, and reply within one month, as the GDPR requires. If we cannot match the address to an account we will ask you for something else that identifies it rather than delete the wrong one.

You do not have to give a reason.

What deletion removes

• Your profile — name, date of birth, gender — and your profile pictures.
• The key that encrypts your account data in our records, which is destroyed, making that data permanently unreadable rather than merely hidden.
• Your link to Google or Apple sign-in, so signing up again creates a genuinely new account.
• Your nearby-event alert settings, and your verified phone number.
• Events you created that have not happened yet, which are cancelled.

Deletion is immediate in the app you can see. Copies made before it — the most recent nightly backups, message queues, server logs — expire on their own schedules. The privacy policy sets out each window.

What deletion does not remove

We would rather tell you than let you assume otherwise:

• Messages you sent stay in those conversations, with you shown as an anonymised sender. Other people are still part of those chats, and removing your half would rewrite their record of a conversation they took part in. Photos and videos you attached are deleted four weeks after they were sent, as every attachment is.
• Events you already held stay, with their name, description and place as written. Future ones are cancelled.
• Crash diagnostics you had switched on and already sent. They carry no account identifier, so we cannot pick yours out; they are deleted on a 90-day cycle.
• The copy of your phone number held by Firebase, which sends the verification SMS, may linger briefly before our server deletes it. Our server deletes it within about an hour, and to do that it holds the number itself in a row of its own for up to about an hour, which a backup taken in that hour can catch.
• The blocks you placed, as a record carrying your identifier and nothing readable about you — because how many people blocked someone is evidence about them.
• Reports, appeals and moderation records, so a decision stays auditable after the account it concerned is gone.
• Nightly backups taken before you deleted — the most recent seven — until each is pruned.

Full detail, including every retention window, is in the privacy policy.

Questions

privacy-where@googlegroups.com