Delete your StrTalk account

Last updated: [DATE]

This page explains how to delete your StrTalk account and exactly what deletion covers.

How to delete

From the app: Settings -> Account -> Delete your account. You will be asked to hold a button and confirm with your fingerprint, face, or screen lock, because this cannot be undone.

Without the app: Delete your account here. You prove the account is yours by signing a message with the same wallet you sign in with - no password, no support ticket, and no identity documents.

We will confirm once deletion is complete. Deleting from the app or from the page above happens straight away. If you ask us to do it instead, we complete the deletion within one month, the deadline data protection law sets for a request like this. That law lets us extend it by two further months for a complex request; if that happens we will tell you inside the first month.

What gets deleted

Deleting your account removes from our servers:

Data stored on your own phone is removed by uninstalling the app.

How long it takes, and what about backups

Deletion from our live systems happens immediately.

We also keep backups of our databases so we can recover from a failure. A backup taken before your deletion still contains your data. Those backups are never used to restore individual accounts, they are deleted on their normal cycle within 7 days, and if we ever have to restore from one, we re-apply every deletion afterwards so your data does not come back.

If deletion fails

Deletion runs across several systems, and like any software it can fail. We check afterwards that every part actually completed.

If something did not, we finish it. If your data was kept for longer than it should have been, we will tell you what happened, what we did about it, and when it was finally removed. We would rather tell you than let you assume a promise was kept.

If you think your data is still there after we told you it was gone, write to privacy@strtalk.sourceless.net and we will check and tell you what we find.

What is not deleted, and why

We would rather be direct about this than let you discover it later.

Messages you already sent to other people

When you send a message it is delivered to the devices of everyone in that conversation. Those copies are theirs, not ours to take back. Deleting your account does not remove them, in the same way that deleting an email account does not unsend the emails you wrote.

If you want to remove specific messages, delete them for everyone before deleting your account. That removes their content, though a marker showing a message was deleted remains in the conversation, and any photo or file attached to it is removed on our normal 30-day media cycle rather than immediately.

Anything you saved to your device

"Save to device" copies a photo, video, voice note, or file out of StrTalk into your phone's normal albums and folders. Once there it is an ordinary file on your phone — outside StrTalk, and unaffected by deleting your account. Delete those yourself if you want them gone.

Your wallet and STR domain

Your STR domain is an NFT you own on the Polygon blockchain, and your wallet address is public blockchain data. Neither belongs to us and neither can be deleted by us or by anyone else — public blockchains are permanent by design. They are unaffected by deleting your StrTalk account, and you can keep using them elsewhere.

The ownership record

Our sign-in service keeps one row per period of ownership of a STR domain: the domain, the wallet that held it, an internal account identifier, and the dates. Deleting your account marks that row revoked rather than erasing it.

We keep it because it is the integrity record of which account legitimately controls a domain at any moment — without it we could not prevent a previous owner from regaining access to an account. It holds no messages, no contacts, and no profile information.

Limited technical records

Records of the IP addresses and devices you connected from are kept for security and abuse prevention and are deleted automatically after 28 days. Our web, call, and application server logs are held in a rolling per-service buffer and are overwritten automatically as new lines arrive. If you reported abuse, or were reported, we keep that record for 12 months. Where the law requires us to retain something, we keep only what is required, for only as long as required.

Can I come back?

Yes. Your identity is your STR domain, so if you still own it you can sign in again and a new account is created. It starts empty: previous conversations, contacts, and message history are not restored.

Questions

privacy@strtalk.sourceless.net