Delete Your Account

Export Your Data First (Optional)

Deletion is irreversible once the grace period ends. Before you start, you may want to download a copy of your personal data under your Article 15 right of access. You can request a complete machine-readable export from your privacy settings at any time — and you do not need to delete your account to do so. Open privacy & data settings.

How to Delete Your Account

Close my account now (self-service)

You can request the deletion of your OutaStory account at any time. To do so from within the app or website:

1. Sign in to your OutaStory account.
2. Navigate to your profile and open "My Account".
3. Scroll to the "Danger Zone" section at the bottom.
4. Tap "Delete Account", choose what should happen to any published stories, and confirm your decision.

If you no longer have access to your account or cannot use the app, you may also request account deletion by emailing us at support@outastory.com.

What Happens to Your Published Stories

When you close your account you choose what should happen to the stories and comments you have published. Whichever option you pick, your name, avatar, and contact details are removed from those works at the end of the grace period.

• Keep my stories public (default) — Your published stories stay readable so the community and any ongoing series remain intact, but they are re-attributed to "Deleted user" — no personal identifiers remain on them.
• Unpublish and anonymise — Your published stories are taken offline and your comments are hidden. The underlying rows are retained only where a financial or statutory record (such as ad-revenue lineage) is legally bound to them; everything else is removed.

Deletion Timeline

Account deletion follows a two-phase process handled by an automated purge service that runs on a daily schedule:

• 30-day grace period — After you request deletion, your account is deactivated but not yet removed. You can cancel the deletion and restore your account at any time during this 30-day grace period by signing back in and visiting your account settings.
• Permanent erasure — Once the 30 days elapse, our purge service finalises the deletion: your per-user data is anonymised or removed, your profile is reduced to a "Deleted user" placeholder, uploaded avatar images are deleted from storage, and the items in the "Data we are required to keep" section below are the only things that remain.
• Login identity removed — As part of finalisation, your login record is also deleted from our identity provider (Auth0) so the sign-in credentials linked to your account no longer exist.

Data That Will Be Deleted

When your account deletion is finalized, the following data is permanently removed or irreversibly anonymised:

• Your profile information (name, avatar, bio, email, phone number, and extended-profile fields such as gender and postal address)
• Your reading history, bookmarks, library, follows, and ratings
• Your preferences, notification settings, and newsletter subscriptions
• Your unpublished drafts and story outlines
• Generated audio files for your stories
• Generated cover images for your stories
• Your email-campaign recipient records — the per-send open and click events tied to your account are hard-deleted (the campaign-suppression list is the one exception; see below)
• For accounts that recorded a birthday: the birthday itself is cleared, and any parental-consent record collected under Article 8 (consent for users under 16) is deleted outright

Data We Are Required to Keep

A few narrow categories of data outlive your account because the law requires it or because deleting them would harm you or the platform. We keep only what is necessary, for no longer than necessary:

• Financial and tax records — Payment, subscription, revenue-share ledger, and ad-impression accounting records are retained for up to 10 years under German tax and commercial law (AO §147 / HGB §257). These records outlive the account and are exempt from erasure; the related ad-impression IP prefixes share this 10-year statutory window.
• Speaker and author payout accounts — If you earned money — as an author through revenue share or as a professional speaker through the voice marketplace — your Stripe-Connect payout account, KYC verification status, tax-form details, and payout history fall under the same 10-year statutory retention as the financial records above, kept solely for accounting and tax-reporting obligations.
• Email-suppression list — If you ever unsubscribed from a marketing or announcement email, your address stays on our suppression list on a legitimate-interest basis — so that we keep honouring your opt-out and never email you again. Deleting it would let a future campaign re-contact an address you explicitly removed.
• Published stories you chose to keep public — If you left your stories public, they remain readable but re-attributed to "Deleted user" with no personal identifiers. If you chose "unpublish and anonymise", they are taken offline instead.
• Abuse and moderation records — Anonymised moderation outcomes (for example, the result of a report) may be kept to protect the platform and its users. Any IP address captured for abuse prevention carries a 12-month retention limit and is then cleared.

Need Help?

If you have questions about your data, need assistance with account deletion, or want to request deletion without access to your account, please contact us at support@outastory.com.