Account Deletion Policy

This policy is part of the Terms. The Privacy Policy has the wider picture of how long information is kept.

1. How to delete your account

1. Log in and open My Profile, then Edit My Profile.
2. At the bottom of the page, choose Delete account.
3. Read the summary, enter your password to confirm it's really you, and press Permanently Delete My Account.

Deletion happens straight away and can't be undone: there is no waiting period and no way to bring the account back. You can create a new account later if you wish, as a fresh start.

Can't log in, or can't reach the site from where you are now? Use "Forgot your password?" on the login page, or email [email protected] from the address on your account and ask us to delete it for you.

2. What is deleted straight away

• your account (email address, username and password) and your profile, including your date of birth, gender, country, bio, location, links and settings;
• your profile picture, header image, ProfiButton and gallery photos (the image files themselves are deleted from our server, not just hidden);
• every private message you sent or received. These disappear for the other person in each conversation too, because a conversation only exists between its two members;
• your fellows and every fellow request you sent or received;
• your guestbook with its entries, and the entries you wrote on other members' guestbooks;
• your Personals and your status, your Heartbeats with their pictures and comments, and the comments you wrote on other Heartbeats;
• the ProfiRings you own, including their members list, group chat and cover image, plus your memberships of other rings and the messages you wrote in their group chats;
• your favorites and other members' favorites of you, your Heartbeat bookmarks, your blocks and other members' blocks of you, and your hidden conversations;
• the hearts you received and the likes you gave (hearts your likes earned other members stay with them, without any link to you), your Plaza character's saved look, your Plaza photos and the postcards you sent or received (the picture files too), your Kindred Hearts map settings, and your Supporter status.

3. What is kept, and why

• Reports. Reports you filed, and reports filed about you, stay in our moderation records, with the link to your account removed, because they are part of keeping the community safe and preventing repeated abuse.
• Supporter payment records. The payment notices Ko-fi sent us (the email address you used on Ko-fi, your message, the amount and the date) are kept for as long as tax and accounting rules require, with the link to your account removed.
• Server logs and backups. Your IP address may remain in the web server's logs for about 14 days, and your data remains in our backups for up to 28 days, until the oldest backups are deleted automatically. Backups are kept with restricted access and are only used to restore the site after a failure. Cloudflare, our network provider, keeps its own records of the traffic it carried for a limited time (see the Privacy Policy).
• Anything we must keep by law. If we have received a legal request, or we have to preserve information about a serious matter (for example, possible harm to a minor) for the police or a court, we keep that information as long as required, even after the account is deleted.
• Things others kept. We can't delete copies that other members made themselves, such as screenshots or quotes, or their own copy of a Plaza photo booth picture you were in.

4. Your Supporter membership

Supporter payments are handled by Ko-fi, so deleting your Handmade Hearts account does not cancel your Ko-fi membership. Cancel it in your own Ko-fi account (Account & Billing → Subscriptions → Don't Renew) before or after deleting your account. Ko-fi keeps its own records under its own privacy policy.

5. When we close an account

If we close an account for breaking the Terms or the Safety Rules, we may keep it deactivated, with its data, for as long as needed to stop the same person from coming back, to deal with any dispute, or to meet a legal obligation, and then delete it.

If an account turns out to belong to someone under 18, or to a high school student, it is restricted immediately and then deleted as described above, except for what we need to keep to prevent the person from registering again, to protect a young person, or to meet a legal obligation.

We don't currently delete accounts just for being inactive. If we ever start doing that, we will announce it on the site and give members notice first.

6. Questions

Write to [email protected] or see Contact & Reporting.