Delete your account

How to delete

In the Android app: You → Delete account. If your account has a password, the app sends you to the website to enter it.

On the website: open Settings and choose Delete account. If your account has a password, you'll be asked for it.

Can't sign in, or don't have the app any more? Email us from the address on your account and ask us to delete it. We'll reply to that address to check it's you, then delete the account the same way the Delete account button does, within 30 days of confirming: support@hearme.chat

What is deleted

• Your account and profile: email, nickname, avatar and settings
• Your friends, kept people and direct messages
• Your push notification sign-ups on the website
• Your messages and memberships in rooms, the profile reactions you gave and received, and your blocks
• Usage records and checkbox age-confirmation records that name your session
• Your Stranger Jury cases and everything on them, and the votes, comments and reports you made, and your Jury notification links

What we keep, and for how long

• Reports and safety records, including reports about you and reports you made, with the messages copied into them as evidence: we delete them automatically 12 months after they are made, or when a ban they support ends if that is later, and later still if the law requires it or an ongoing investigation needs it. A report a moderator confirms as child safety or under 18, with a frozen copy of the messages shown with it, is kept for one year from the confirmation instead (longer if a moderator extends it for the authorities), even if you delete your account
• Ban records, a keyed one-way code of a banned account's verified email and Google account (never the address), a record of the connection (IP address) used to enforce a ban, and a marker that your session was deleted: the ban records stay for as long as the ban is in effect, and the marker for 31 days or as long as a ban lasts. When a timed ban ends the codes stop blocking anyone, and we then delete them automatically; the connection record stops blocking after 30 days (72 hours for a child-safety or under-18 ban) but is not deleted on a schedule yet
• Billing records: the record of each Premium purchase stays. On the website that is the payment processor's full notice to us: it includes the email address you paid with and whatever else the processor sends (such as your name or country), the plan, the amount and the processor's IDs. It is no longer tied to your account record, but the email address still identifies you. We keep them for as long as tax and accounting law requires; we have no automatic deletion for them yet, so for now they stay. Our payment processor Freemius also keeps its own records
• Chat records (who was matched with whom, when and for how long; no content) and the name you went by: removed within 24 hours. The random-chat message log (the last 30 messages of a chat you were in) is not wiped when you delete your account: it expires on its own, 24 hours after the chat's first message, so a report on that chat can still be reviewed
• Voice clips sent with a report, and any transcript of them: deleted within 7 days of the report, unless a moderator confirms the report as child safety or under 18; then the clip and any transcript are kept as evidence for one year from the confirmation and is not deleted with your account
• Copies in our encrypted backups (deleted automatically within about a month, or about 8 weeks for weekly backups; they include held child-safety evidence) and our server logs, which hold IP addresses (up to 90 days, and about 2 weeks for our own voice relay); our app's own logs also record IP addresses with suspected abuse, such as a failed bot check, and are deleted after 14 days
• The log of our moderators' actions about your account (for example that it was banned or unbanned): 12 months

If you have Premium

Premium is cancelled when you delete your account, so it doesn't renew. Premium is sold only on the website.

Used HearMe Chat without an account?

A guest session ends after 30 days without activity. We then delete the guest's data automatically. If the guest's Premium is still running, we wait until it has ended and the guest has been inactive for 30 days. If you used the Android app as a guest, You → Delete account deletes it straight away. On the website, a guest's data is deleted when the session expires, as above. A guest on the website has no email address with us, so we can't find a guest's data from an email.