Delete account

You can delete your Snakken account at any time, for any reason, without giving one. You do not need the app installed to do it, and you do not need to reinstall it.

Deleting is free, takes effect the moment it is confirmed, and you choose what happens to the things you have written.

Two ways to delete

In the app — the fast route

Open Account → Delete account, choose what should happen to your posts, and confirm with your passkey. Your account is hidden from everyone else immediately, and you are told the exact date on which your data is removed.

By email — if you no longer have the app

If you have already uninstalled Snakken, or you cannot sign in, write to us:

privacy@snakken.app

Send the message from the email address your account uses and tell us:

• that you want your account deleted, and
• which of the two options below you are choosing — keep my posts without my name, or delete everything. If you do not say, we will ask before we do anything.

That is all we need. Please do not send us a copy of an identity document. We do not ask for one, and we would have to delete it again.

We handle deletion requests by hand — a person reads your email and files the request for you. You will get a reply confirming the request and naming the exact date your data is removed. If we cannot reasonably establish that the request comes from you — for example because it arrives from an address the account does not know — we may ask you for further information first (Art. 12(6) GDPR). We will never ask for more than we need to be sure.

We answer within one month of receiving your request (Art. 12(3) GDPR).

What happens to what you have written

Deletion is not one thing, because a neighbourhood conversation is not only yours. You choose:

Keep my posts, but without my name. Your profile and everything about you personally is deleted. Your posts, place entries, photos and comments stay in the neighbourhood, with the authorship removed — no name, no profile, no link back to you. Conversations other people took part in stay readable.

Delete everything. Your profile and your posts, comments, photos and videos are removed. What you contributed disappears from the neighbourhood, including the image and video files themselves.

Both options are a full deletion of you. They differ only in whether what you wrote survives without you.

What happens, and when

Immediately. Your account becomes invisible to everyone else — profile, posts, everything. You are signed out on every device, your follows and notifications end, and we stop processing your data for anything other than the few retained records named below.

For 30 days you can change your mind. Signing in again within the window cancels the deletion in full and your account continues as if nothing had happened. If you asked by email, replying to us before the date we gave you does the same thing.

After 30 days. Everything is removed for good: both of our databases, the media storage and your login (email address, passkeys, sessions). This is the point of no return — we keep no backups and no file version history, so there is no second copy anywhere to come back later.

The 30 days are a safety net for you, not a delay for us. Account deletion is irreversible and is sometimes done in anger, by accident, or by someone who has just lost their phone.

What is deleted, what is anonymised, what we keep

The full, table-by-table version of this is our internal retention concept; this is the same document in plain language.

Deleted in both cases

Your profile (name, display name, description, neighbourhood, profile pictures), your notification settings, your registered devices, your follows in both directions, your check-ins, event registrations, group memberships, reactions, story views, wishlists, redeemed offers, dismissed warnings and safety statuses, the interest weights we inferred about you, your activity history — and your login itself, including your passkeys.

Kept, but no longer yours

Some things are shared, and destroying them would delete other people's data along with yours. These survive with your authorship severed — the entry stays, you disappear from it:

• Events you organised, because other people have registered for them.
• Places you added to the map, groups that still have other members, and programme entries in a shared event catalogue.
• Organisations you created — the organisation is a separate party, not you.
• Records of the kind "who invited this member", "who granted this permission" — the organisation's own accountability record, which cannot name you any more.

If you own a group that still has other members, we will ask you to hand it over to one of them before the deletion runs. A group that nobody can administer is worse for everyone than a deletion that waits a day.

Kept because the law requires it

These few records survive your deletion. They are restricted: marked, excluded from every normal part of Snakken, never used for anything else, and deleted as soon as the period below runs out.

• Reports and appeals about moderation decisions — for at least six months after the decision was communicated, because the Digital Services Act (Art. 20(1) Regulation (EU) 2022/2065) requires that such a decision stay contestable for that long, including by the other side. Legal basis: Art. 17(3)(b) and (e) GDPR.
• The record of which legal texts you accepted, when — for three years, counted from the end of the year in which you accepted them, as evidence that a contract existed (Art. 17(3)(e) GDPR, §§ 195 and 199(1) BGB). Depending on the month, that is up to three years and ten months.
• The administrative log of the deletion itself — for three years, counted the same way, from the end of the year in which we deleted. We have to be able to prove that we did what you asked (Art. 5(2) GDPR).
• The internal account number your data used to hang from — kept indefinitely, but with the link to your identity irreversibly severed, so that the restricted records above stay coherent without pointing at a person. This makes it pseudonymous, not anonymous, and we say so rather than call it deleted.

Independently of any deletion, our web server logs (IP address, requested page, time) are deleted after 30 days — that applies whether or not you ever had an account.

What we do not keep

We do not keep anything under commercial or tax law. Snakken processes no payments and issues no invoices — the prices you see in the app are what a place charges at its own counter — so the German retention duties for accounting records (§ 257 HGB, § 147 AO) do not apply to us. Should that ever change, this page and our privacy policy change with it, before it changes.

Asking for a copy of your data (Art. 15 GDPR)

You do not have to delete your account to find out what we hold about you. Write to:

privacy@snakken.app

Send it from the address your account uses and tell us what you would like. You can ask for everything, or only for a part of it.

You will receive a copy of your personal data together with the information Art. 15(1) GDPR requires: the purposes we process it for, who receives it, how long we keep it, where we got it from, your right to complain to a supervisory authority, and whether any automated decision-making is involved. Information that would reveal another person's data is left out — their rights limit your copy (Art. 15(4) GDPR).

How long it takes. We answer within one month of receiving your request (Art. 12(3) GDPR). If a request is unusually complex, we may extend that by up to two further months — but we will tell you inside the first month that we are doing so, and why. Silence is not an option we have.

Identifying you. If we have reasonable doubts that the request really comes from you, we may ask for the additional information we need to be sure (Art. 12(6) GDPR) — no more than that, and never an identity document unless we have explained why nothing else will do.

Your other rights

You can also have inaccurate data corrected (Art. 16), have processing restricted (Art. 18), receive your data in a machine-readable format (Art. 20), object to processing based on our legitimate interests (Art. 21), and withdraw consent at any time with effect for the future (Art. 7(3)). The same address works for all of them.

If you think we have handled your data wrongly, you can complain to a data protection supervisory authority (Art. 77 GDPR). Ours is:

Der Hessische Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit
Gustav-Stresemann-Ring 1, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany
datenschutz.hessen.de

Who you are writing to

Dennis Post
Lilistraße 67
63067 Offenbach am Main
Germany
privacy@snakken.app

The full picture of what we process and why is in our privacy policy.