Delete your account

In the Vizdea app

Deletion takes effect 21 days after you ask for it, and you can cancel at any time before then.

Open the Vizdea app and sign in.
Open Settings from your profile.
Under Delete account, tap Delete my account.
Confirm. Settings then shows the date your account will be deleted.

On the web

You can do the same from any browser at vizdea.com.

Sign in at vizdea.com/sign-in.
Go to Settings, then Profile, then Your data.
Under Delete your account, type DELETE and choose Schedule deletion.

Without the app, or if you cannot sign in

Email info@vizdea.com from the email address on your Vizdea account, with the subject Delete my account, and include your username. We act only on requests we can verify came from the account owner, so we may reply to that address to confirm. Once confirmed, we schedule the deletion with the same 21-day window and tell you the date.

The 21-day window

For 21 days after you request deletion your account stays as it is, so a mistaken or malicious request can be undone. To cancel, sign in and choose Cancel deletion in Settings, or reply to our email if you asked by email. After 21 days the account is permanently erased and cannot be recovered, unless a safety or legal hold applies, as explained next.

When deletion has to wait for a hold

India’s Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 require us to keep content we remove, and the records around it, for 180 days so it is available to an investigation, and longer if a court or authorised agency requires it. So when the 21 days end, we check whether a hold applies to your account. One does if:

In the last 180 days, a moderator removed one of your posts, comments or images, your profile photo, or a community, startup or role you ran.
In the last 180 days, a moderator restricted your account, or decided a report about you by removing content or restricting your account.
A safety or harassment report about you, your content, or a conversation with you has not been decided yet.
A Vizdea moderator or administrator has placed a hold on your account’s records, for example for an investigation or a legal request.

If a hold applies

Your account is closed on the scheduled date instead of being erased, and we email you to say so. While it is closed:

You are signed out everywhere and cannot sign in. If you try, you are told the account is closed and is being deleted.
Other members can no longer see your profile, posts, comments or photos. Your follows and connections end, which closes your conversations, and any application you have pending is withdrawn.
Communities and startups you ran are handed on or closed exactly as they would be at erasure, and your memberships end.
Your messages, posts, comments, photos and reports are kept as they are, and only our moderators can see them.
We check again every hour. As soon as no hold applies, the account is permanently erased as described below, and we email you to confirm. You do not need to do anything.

What is deleted

When the account is erased we delete the following, apart from the copies of reported or removed content described under What is kept:

Your account: email address, username, name, password hash, optional phone number, and sign-in sessions, including the device label stored for app sign-ins.
Your profile: headline, bio, location, role, skills, interests, visibility settings, and collaboration preferences.
Everything you posted: your posts, including polls and the images in them, your comments, and the direct messages you sent. Messages other members sent you are deleted too, so your conversations disappear for the other member as well.
The photos you uploaded, your profile photo and the images in your posts, deleted from our file storage as well as from Vizdea.
Your activity: appreciations, saves, poll votes, follows, connections and connection requests, notifications, blocks and mutes, posts you hid, and discovery feedback.
Your memberships in communities, startups, and institutions, and the appeals, applications, and privacy requests you filed.

What is kept, and for how long

Security logs: the record of sign-ins, account changes, and moderation actions. They are detached from your account when it is erased, though some entries still include your former username or account ID. We keep them, with no fixed end date, for as long as we need them to investigate abuse and fraud and to meet legal obligations.
Moderation records: reports other members made about you or your content, and the decisions moderators took on them. They are kept with no fixed end date, so that deleting an account does not erase the record of what it did.
Reports you filed: kept, no longer linked to your account, so that leaving Vizdea does not erase the record of what someone else did.
Content that is part of a report or was removed by our moderators, copied before erasure to a store only our moderators can see: a conversation you or the other member reported, and your posts (with their images), comments and photos, or other members’ comments under your posts, that were reported or removed. Each copy is deleted 180 days after the report is decided or the removal was made, and never while a report it serves is still open. A conversation with a member whose records are under a hold, and that member’s comments under your posts, are copied too, and deleted 180 days after the hold ends. Content nobody reported, removed or holds is not kept, and neither is content whose report was closed without removing content or restricting an account.
Records of the verification codes we sent to your email address, which include that address: kept with no fixed end date, to detect abuse of sign-up and sign-in.
Communities you owned pass to their longest-standing moderator or member, or are archived if nobody is left.
Startups where you were the last founder or cofounder pass to their longest-standing remaining team member, or failing that advisor, whose place on the team is verified and whose account is active; they become a cofounder. If there is nobody, the startup is closed, its roles stop taking applications, and everyone still waiting on an application is told it was declined. Every other startup you were part of stays as it is, without you.
Database backups roll off within 14 days of erasure, and server request logs within 30 days.

Download your data first

If you want a copy, request an export in Settings under Your data before the 21 days end. It is available to download from Settings on vizdea.com for seven days. The privacy policy at vizdea.com/privacy explains everything else we do with your data.