OutaStory offers two separate things that both sound like
"delete everything", and people mix them up constantly. This
article is about the first one.
- Erasing your data — a request under Article 17 of the
GDPR. Your account still exists afterwards and stays
usable. - Deleting your account — the account itself goes away. That
is the other path, described in
Deleting your account.
Where to start it
Open Profile → Privacy at
/profile/privacy. Erasure lives on the same
page as Download my data.
Export first. Once an erasure has run there is nothing left to
export, so take your copy while you still can — see
Downloading a copy of your data.
What "your account still works" means in practice
After an erasure you are not signed out of OutaStory for good.
You can still sign in, and the account is still yours. What
changes is the personal information held about you: it is removed
or reduced to something that no longer describes you personally.
Practically, that means you should expect:
- profile details you filled in to be gone from your account,
- anything built on those details to look empty rather than
wrong, and - to be starting from a blank profile if you carry on using the
platform.
It is a one-way step. There is no "undo erasure" button, and we
cannot restore what has been erased — not on request, not later.
Who should choose erasure rather than deletion
Erasure fits you if you want your personal information off the
platform but do not want to lose the account itself. Deletion
fits you if your goal is to leave OutaStory entirely.
If you are unsure which one you want, read the deletion article
first — it is the more drastic of the two and the harder one to
recover from.
What cannot be erased on request
Some records have to be kept. Where a law obliges us to retain
something — for example accounting and tax records, or data we
need to keep in order to defend or establish legal claims — an
erasure request does not remove it. That is not us being awkward:
the same GDPR that gives you the right to erasure also recognises
these limits.
Records kept for those reasons are not used to carry on
profiling you or marketing to you. The
privacy policy is the place where the retention
periods and the reasons for them are written down.
If you have questions first
You do not have to guess. Open a ticket at
/help/contact and ask before you act —
erasure is much easier to understand beforehand than to reverse
afterwards.