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" 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

If you have published at least one story a reader can read, your stories and your author profile are taken offline when the grace period ends — every story, single or serialised, under every pen name you own. Until that moment nothing is hidden: for the whole 90 days your stories stay in the catalogue, in search and on your profile exactly as they are now. The only change is a notice added to each story page and to the profile, saying that the work will become unavailable and on what date. Cancel the deletion and those notices disappear. Whichever option you pick below, your name, avatar and contact details are removed from your works at the end of the grace period.

• Keep my stories public until the end (default) — Your stories stay in the catalogue, in search and on your profile for the whole grace period, carrying the notice above, and the comments you have written stay where they are. When the period ends, the stories and the profile go offline together.
• Unpublish and anonymise — Your stories reach the same end, and your comments are hidden as well — they render as “[deleted]” once the deletion is finalised. The underlying rows are kept only where a financial or statutory record (such as ad-revenue lineage) is legally bound to them; everything else is removed.

If You Write Under Pen Names

There are two different things you can delete here, and they are not the same action. Read this before you start, because neither one is a way of doing the other.

• Deleting your account — Everything on this page applies to every pen name you own and to the stories published under each of them. The whole account shares one date: the grace period is worked out once — 90 days if any story under any of your pen names is published and readable, otherwise 30 — and when it ends your account, all of your pen names and all of their stories go together.
• Deleting one pen name — You can also delete a single pen name from “Pen names” in your profile without closing your account. Only that pen name is affected. It gets its own grace period, measured from that pen name’s own published state — 90 days if at least one story published under it is readable, otherwise 30 — and at the end of it the pen-name page and those stories become unreachable and drop out of search, exactly as described above. Your account, your other pen names and their stories are untouched and keep working normally throughout.

Deletion Timeline

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

• Grace period — 30 days, or 90 if you have published — After you request deletion, nothing has been removed yet and your account keeps working normally — you stay signed in and can still read and write. The period is 30 days if you have never published a story, and 90 days if at least one story of yours is published and readable, so that your readers have time to find and finish your work. Signing back in during the grace period does not cancel the deletion by itself: to restore your account, sign in, open “My Account”, and click “Cancel Deletion”.
• Permanent erasure — When the grace period ends, our purge service finalises the deletion: your per-user data is removed or irreversibly anonymised, uploaded avatar images are deleted from storage, and the account record itself is deleted outright — unless a financial or moderation record is legally bound to it, chiefly the revenue-share and tax records described below with their 10-year statutory retention, in which case it is anonymised to a “Deleted user” placeholder instead. The items in the “Data we are required to keep” section below are the only things that remain.
• Removed from search — If you had published stories, they and the author profile they appeared under are also taken out of our own search index and out of Google’s and Bing’s. Their addresses stop serving the work — they answer “410 Gone”, the standard signal that a page has been permanently removed — and they are dropped from our sitemap. Bing is told directly, the moment it happens; Google does not accept that kind of notification, so it learns from the dead address and the shortened sitemap the next time it looks.
• 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
• Personal narrations you made of other writers' stories (the audio generated for your own stories stays with those stories)
• The editable cover designs you built in the cover designer, together with the backgrounds and layers they were made from — the finished cover on a published story is kept with that story
• 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.
• Story and chapter records — Your stories are not erased from our database: every ad-impression and revenue-share row points at a story record, and the 10-year statutory retention above requires that chain to stay intact. What ends is public access. The stories are marked deleted, their addresses stop serving them, and they leave the catalogue, search, your profile and the search engines — nobody can read them any more, you included.
• Unpublished drafts — Closing your account does not by itself permanently delete a story record, so your unpublished drafts and their chapters may remain in our database — unpublished, unreachable and visible to nobody — for as long as a financial or statutory record is bound to your account. If you want a draft gone for good, delete it yourself from “My stories” before you close your account.
• 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.