Account deletion

Deleting your account.

Pages like this usually hold a form: type your email address, and the company finds your account and deletes it. Ours cannot, because we never collected an email address, a phone number or a name, so there is nothing you could type here that would let us find you. That is not an obstacle we put in your way. It is the product.

This page applies to the KnownSquare mobile application, operated by SSDittah Innovations LLP. It is the account-deletion resource referenced by our listings on Google Play and the Apple App Store.

1. How to delete your account

In the app: Settings → Delete account, at the bottom of the screen. The app will ask you to confirm, in plain words, that deletion is immediate and cannot be undone: not by you, and not by us. Once you confirm, the deletion completes before the screen returns. There is no waiting period, no “30 days to change your mind”, and no archived copy we could restore from.

One situation makes the app ask you to do something first: if you run a group that still has other members, you will be asked to hand the group to someone else before deleting, so that your leaving does not take the group away from everyone in it.

2. Why deletion lives in the app, and not on this page

Your account is proved by a cryptographic key that exists only on your phone. When you delete your account, your device signs the request, and that signature is the only thing that can authorise it. This is the same reason nobody who phones, emails or fills in a web form claiming to be you, convincingly or otherwise, can delete your account, read it, or take it over.

A deletion form on this website would not be a convenience. It would be a way for someone who is not you to try to destroy your account, and we would have no means of telling the difference. So the form does not exist, on purpose, and the app, the one place your identity can actually be proved, does the deleting.

3. If you no longer have your phone

If you set up guardians in the app, recovery through them can bring your account to a new phone, and you can delete it from there. That route exists precisely so that losing a handset does not mean losing control of the account.

If recovery is not open to you, write to [email protected] and a person will help. We will be honest with you about the limits: because we hold no name, email or phone number, we cannot look your account up from anything you can tell us, and we will not delete an account on the say-so of an unverifiable message, for the reasons in section 2. What we can always tell you is what would remain if the account were simply left: the handful of pseudonymous records listed in our privacy policy, none of which contain your name, your face or a word you ever wrote. Messages queued for delivery expire on their own within three days, and connections your family removes from their side are deleted as they go.

4. What is deleted, and what remains

Deleted, immediately, when you confirm in the app:

• Your anonymous account identifier and public keys.
• Every connection record naming your account, including group membership.
• Messages still queued for delivery to you.
• Your push notification token, invitation codes, and any reports involving your account.
• Everything on your own phone: your messages, your Locker, your keys. The app wipes its local data and returns to the start screen.

Copies inside our encrypted database backups age out within 30 days. There is no archive of deleted accounts, deliberately: a store of deleted accounts would be the one place the things you asked us to erase could still be found, and we chose not to have one.

What remains, and why:

• Messages you already sent live on the phones of the people you sent them to, encrypted, exactly as a letter you posted lives with its recipient. They were never ours to hold or to take back.
• If you subscribed to a paid feature, the purchase records kept by Google or Apple, and the minimal records tax law requires us to keep, survive for as long as that law requires: in India, currently at least six years. They reference a purchase, not your conversations or connections.

The people you were connected to are told that the conversation has ended, and nothing more. What you wrote to them was never on our servers to begin with.

5. Questions

Anything unclear, or anything on this page that does not match what the app actually did, is worth an email: [email protected]. The full detail of what we hold while an account exists is in the privacy policy, and what deletion means for it is in that policy’s section 7.

Privacy policy →