In the phone app
- Tap Me at the bottom of the screen.
- Tap Settings.
- Tap Delete account at the bottom of Settings, under Log out. It is also under Settings, Privacy.
- Confirm it. Type the word DELETE in capital letters, enter your password, and tap Delete my account.
In the web version
Log in at stoasquare.com in any browser, then:
- Open Settings from the menu on the left. In a narrow window, tap Me, then Settings.
- Choose Delete account at the bottom of Settings.
- Confirm it. Type the word DELETE in capital letters, enter your password, and choose Delete my account.
7 days to change your mind
Nothing is removed for 7 days. We email you the day it will happen, and you stay logged in. To cancel, choose Keep my account on Home, on Me, or in Settings under Delete account. Logging in again does not cancel it.
If a report about you or an appeal of yours is still being decided, or you hold a public office on StoaSquare, a person decides before your account is removed. Deleting an account is never a way around a decision.
What is deleted
After the 7 days:
- Your name, @username, email address, password, bio, community area, website, profile photo and cover photo.
- Your sign-in records and devices, your two-step key and passkeys, and the push address of each phone.
- Your follows, blocks, mutes, likes, saved posts, poll votes, the issues you picked, your voting plan, your muted words, your notification settings and your notices.
- Your photos and documents. Your posts become empty lines and your replies become “[deleted]”, so the conversations around them still make sense.
- Your private conversations, for both people. In a group chat your messages go and you leave it; the chat goes on for the others.
- Groups you own pass to their longest-serving moderator. A group with no moderator is deleted, with the posts in it.
- Your badge requests and your requests to list a business or an organization.
- The messages you sent us with Report a problem, except a child safety concern.
What is kept, and for how long
- An empty placeholder for the account, with no name, email address or other detail, so your old posts and replies keep their place.
- Your @username, only in a scrambled form, for a year, so nobody new can take it and old mentions never lead to a stranger.
- Which version of the terms you accepted and when, with a scrambled form of the network you were on when you accepted them (never your internet address itself), for twelve months after you asked to delete the account.
- Reports you sent, reports about you, and moderators’ decisions, strikes and appeals, with a copy of what was reported: for twelve months from when each was made or decided, then deleted.
- A child safety concern you sent us with Report a problem, like a report: for twelve months from when you sent it, then deleted.
- If you were a moderator of a group: the group’s record of what you did as its moderator (each step, with the reason you typed), for twelve months from when you did it, then deleted.
- A record of what our staff did about your account (each decision, its reason and the staff member’s note, filed under your account’s number) is kept for at least three years, and nobody can change it.
- Anything a law requires us to keep: while a child-safety report is open, after one is filed with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, or under a law-enforcement request, the account and what the case needs are kept until that ends. A filed child-safety report is kept for one year.
- If a moderator removed an account (rather than its member deleting it), a scrambled form of its email address is kept for a year, so it cannot join again.
- Backup copies of our databases are not edited when an account is deleted. Older copies are deleted as newer ones are made.
If you cannot log in
Use Forgot password on the log-in screen to get back in first, then follow the steps above.
If that does not work, write to contact@stoasquare.com from the email address on the account and ask us to delete it. A person reads it and answers.
An account whose email address was never confirmed is deleted by itself after 7 days.
More
Before you delete it, you can download a copy of your account and everything you wrote, in Settings under Privacy. The privacy page says what we keep while you have an account.