What happens to my chats when I delete my account?
Account deletion and chats
When you delete your WandelWeb account, we handle your chat data with respect for both your privacy and that of the people you chatted with.
What we delete:
- Your profile data, including name and username
- Your encrypted key backup — nobody can decrypt your old messages after deletion
- Your block list
- Your presence data
What we keep:
- Your sent messages remain in the chats of the other people, because those are their private conversations
- But in those chats your name is replaced with "Deleted user"
- The messages remain unreadable to us — they stay end-to-end encrypted on the recipients' devices
Why this approach?
If we also removed messages in other people's chats, those people would lose their conversation history. That would harm their privacy. So we anonymise rather than wipe.
Under the GDPR:
This falls under lawful processing for the privacy of other users. If you do want a specific message removed from someone else's chat, please contact us.
