Deleting your Hello World account

You can delete your Hello World account yourself, from inside the app. It takes effect immediately, it erases what you made, and it cannot be undone.

How to delete your account

1. Open Hello World and go to the Profile tab.
2. Tap the gear icon in the top right to open Settings.
3. Scroll to the bottom.
4. Tap Delete my account, below Sign out.
5. Confirm.

You do not need to contact us, and there is no form to fill in. If the deletion fails — no signal, for instance — the app tells you so and you stay signed in. You are only signed out once the account has really been deleted.

If you cannot open the app

If you have already removed Hello World from your phone, lost the device, or cannot sign in, write to support@helloworldmessenger.com from the email address on the account, or tell us the phone number it used. Say that you want the account deleted. We will verify that the account is yours before deleting anything — which is a protection for you, since otherwise anyone could close your account by sending an email.

When it happens

Immediately. There is no waiting period and no cooling-off window, and there is no way to reverse it afterwards. Your sign-in details are destroyed as part of the deletion, so even we cannot restore the account — if you come back, you come back as a new account.

Every device you were signed in on is signed out, and we stop being able to send notifications to any of them.

What is deleted

At once, when you confirm:

• Your name. It is replaced by “Deleted account”.
• Your email address and phone number, and the fingerprints of them that let people find you. Nobody can find you by either afterwards, and the address and number become free to use on a new account.
• Your password and your PIN.
• Your connection to Apple or Google, if you signed in with either.
• Your profile photo, cover photo and chat background — the files themselves, not only the record of them.
• Your enrolled voice, if you set up My Voice: the voice model and every recording it was built from.
• Screenshots you attached to feedback.
• Your sessions and sign-in tokens, and the ability to send notifications to your devices.
• Guardian links. If you supervised someone, or were supervised, the link ends.

Then, usually within minutes, everything you made. If that is interrupted, it starts again every hour until it has finished.

• Every message you sent, deleted for everyone in every conversation — the words, the translations, the photos, videos, voice notes and files, and the notifications about them.
• Your posts and Moments, with their photos and videos, and your Memories.
• Your comments, likes, reactions, bookmarks and collections.
• Flashes you sent — the photo or video and the caption — and your flash inbox.
• Your shop and its listings, with their photos.
• Your contacts and the entries for you in other people’s contacts, your follows, blocks and requests, and the circles you own.
• Everything else about you: measurements and who you shared them with, location shares, the meetings you organized, your settings, interests, translation corrections and words, notifications, crash reports and diagnostics, devices, and what remained on the account — bio, date of birth, city, country and history.

What stays, and why

This is the part most services are vague about, so here it is plainly. Each of these is also somebody else’s, or is what keeps somebody safe.

• Reports you made, which are about somebody else’s conduct — and reports about you, with a copy of what was reported, so that closing an account cannot be used to wipe a record of abuse. A conversation that was under an open report keeps a copy of its messages until 30 days after the report is resolved.
• Orders, which are the other person’s record of a sale; calls and savings circles, which are the other person’s history too.
• Your username is never released. Nobody can take it afterwards, so nobody can register your name and be mistaken for you.
• The words of your feedback notes, without your name or screenshots, which is how we keep track of what you asked us to fix.
• The record of a Hello World Premium subscription, no longer linked to you, so Apple’s later messages about it can still be applied.
• Security records — a log that the deletion happened, and the ordinary technical logs the servers keep.
• Backups keep a copy for up to 14 days, because a backup that could be edited would not be a backup.

Deleting your account does not cancel Hello World Premium. Apple bills the subscription: cancel it in your iPhone’s Settings → your name → Subscriptions, or billing continues.

Deleting only some of your data

You do not have to close your account to remove things from it. Voice recordings, what the translator has learned from you, individual posts, comments, messages and photos can all be deleted separately, while your account carries on. Deleting your data lists what and where.

A child’s account

A supervised account is deleted the same way, from inside that account. If you are a guardian and the child cannot do it themselves, write to support@helloworldmessenger.com from the address on your own account, say which account you are asking about, and we will handle it.

Asking us anything about it

support@helloworldmessenger.com. If you want to know what data we hold about you before deciding, ask for that first — you are entitled to it, and deletion is easier to decide with the list in front of you.