Delete your Pooled account

Doing it yourself, in the app

• Step 1. Open Pooled.
• Step 2. Tap your picture at the top of the home screen to open the menu.
• Step 3. Choose Delete account, near the bottom of the menu. (It is also at the foot of your Profile screen.)
• Step 4. To confirm, type the number the app shows you. If you have not signed in recently, Google asks you to prove it is you, with your password or by choosing your Google account again, so that somebody who picks up your unlocked phone cannot do this to you.

It happens immediately. There is no waiting period, no “we are sorry to see you go” email, and nothing to cancel afterwards. That also means there is no undo, so take an export first if you want to keep your records. Export is in the same menu.

No account? Then the same control is called Reset everything. With no account, nothing was ever sent to us, so there is nothing of yours in the cloud to delete. Reset everything wipes the phone and returns the app to its welcome screen. Uninstalling the app does the same.

If you cannot get into the app

Lost the phone, forgotten the password, or already uninstalled? Email us and ask us to delete the account:

support@sunnyorbitapps.com, with the subject line “Delete my Pooled account”.

• Send it from the email address the account uses. That is how we know the request is yours. If you can no longer use that address, tell us the address and we will work out another way to confirm it with you.
• Include the email address of the account, if it is not the one you are writing from, and the name shown on your profile.
• Never send your password. We will never ask for it, and we do not need it to delete the account.

We will confirm it is your address, delete the account and everything listed below, and write back to say it is done. Expect that within 30 days, and normally much sooner. If we cannot confirm that the request came from the account holder, we will not act on it, because the alternative is that anybody could delete anybody's ledger by sending an email.

What is deleted

Everything below goes, from our servers and from the phone:

• Your sign-in: the account itself, so the address can be used again from scratch.
• Your profile: name, email address, profile picture, the date you accepted the Terms of Use, and your block list.
• Your personal wallets in full: every expense, every income, every transfer, every budget, every category you made, every grocery list and everything on it, including anything you had already deleted in the app.
• Every lent & borrowed record, and every repayment against it.
• Every receipt photo, every lent & borrowed photo and your profile picture, both the copy on the phone and the copy uploaded to cloud storage.
• Any pending request you had sent to join somebody's shared space.

On the phone this is a real erase rather than a marker saying “deleted”: the app comes back at its welcome screen with nothing in it, the way it was before you installed it.

Photos

Your uploaded photos are deleted too, in the same press of the button. Every receipt and lent & borrowed photo in your personal wallets, and your profile picture, are removed from cloud storage while you are still signed in. There is nothing to email us about afterwards and nothing to wait for.

If any photo cannot be removed, usually because the connection dropped, the app stops and deletes nothing. It tells you which file it could not remove, and lets you try again. It will not delete your account over a photo that would then be stranded in storage with no account left that could reach it.

The one exception is photos you attached to entries in a shared space. Those stay with the entries, for the same reason the entries do, which the next section explains. You lose your own access to them when your membership closes. If you want them gone, take them off those entries, or leave the space, before deleting your account.

What stays, and why

Shared spaces you were in with other people. If you and a flatmate kept a shared ledger, that ledger is theirs as much as yours, and the money has to still add up for them after you leave. So the space itself stays, and the entries and transfers in it stay.

What we do take off them is you:

• Your name is replaced with a generic label.
• Your profile picture is taken off your membership, so they no longer see it.
• Your membership is closed, so the space no longer appears for you and you can no longer read it.
• Receipt photos you attached to entries in that space stay with those entries, for the same reason the entries do.

What remains is an anonymous entry in somebody else's household accounts, something like “someone put in ৳600”, with no name or picture attached. A note you typed on one of those entries stays with it, so if you wrote anything identifying in a note, edit it before you go. We think this is the right balance between your right to be forgotten and their right to have their own records make sense. If you want your name removed from a shared space before deleting your account, leave the space first.

Shared spaces you created are not deleted either, not even one that nobody else ever joined. Deleting your account removes your own personal wallets, and leaves every shared space where it is so that it is never deleted out from under somebody else. If you want a shared space gone, delete the space itself in the app first.

Backups

We do not keep backups of the Pooled database, and point-in-time recovery is switched off. Our database, Google Cloud Firestore, keeps earlier versions of changed or deleted records for one hour, after which they are gone. Google may take longer to clear deleted data out of its own systems, as its Firebase data processing terms set out. Nobody can read or restore a single person's data from there.

If it does not work

Deleting a full ledger is hundreds of small operations, and on a bad connection some of them can fail. If that happens the app tells you so and leaves the account intact rather than half-erased. Try again on a better signal. If it keeps failing, email support@sunnyorbitapps.com and we will finish it from our side.

The Pooled Privacy Policy has the full detail of what we hold and for how long.