Account & Data Deletion

Gaslight

You can delete your Gaslight account at any time, from inside the app. No email or request form is needed.

How to delete your account

1. Open the Gaslight app
2. Go to Settings
3. Tap Delete Account
4. Confirm when prompted

Deletion happens immediately. It cannot be undone, and your account cannot be recovered afterwards.

What is deleted

In the main database (Supabase), deleting your account removes the following from our servers:

• Your profile record, which is what ties your UserID to your sign-in
• Your public encryption keys and your pool of one-time keys, in our main database
• Your connections — the list of people you are connected to
• Your push notification tokens, so you stop receiving notifications
• Your profile picture, if you set one
• Your last-seen timestamp, if you had one
• Messages and read-receipt signals addressed to you that had not yet been delivered

What remains after deletion

Deleting your account does not remove everything. These remain on our servers:

• A copy of your public encryption keys in Google Firebase. The app writes your key bundle there as well as to the main database, and deleting your account does not delete the Firebase copy.
• A record in Google Firebase that links your UserID to an anonymous Firebase sign-in. The app writes it each time it starts. Deleting your account does not delete it.
• An anonymous sign-in record in our main database. It holds no personal detail, and once your profile record is deleted it is no longer linked to your UserID.
• Messages and read-receipt signals you sent that the other person's device had not yet collected. They are encrypted. Each stays until their device collects it or until it is automatically deleted after 30 days.
• Two reliability counters — your UserID and two numbers, kept to monitor the move between backends. They are not removed.
• Records that older versions of the app wrote to Google Firebase. Connection, notification-token, online-status and read-receipt documents from those versions are not removed when you delete your account in the main database.

On your device, deleting your account erases your messages, your contacts and nicknames, and the recovery phrase that represents your identity. It does not erase your read-receipt and theme preferences, media you opened (which the app keeps in a cache), cached profile pictures, or any media or backup files you exported or saved. The cache goes when you uninstall the app; files you exported or saved stay until you delete them.

What is kept, and why

The content of your conversations — messages and any photos or videos you shared — is end‑to‑end encrypted. We cannot read it, and we never could. Only you and the person you were talking to hold the keys.

A conversation belongs to both people in it. Deleting your account removes your copy, but it does not delete the other person's copy of the same conversation. Their messages are theirs, and erasing their history is not something we do on someone else's behalf.

Deleting a specific conversation

If you want to remove a single conversation rather than your whole account, delete the contact or the conversation from inside the app first, then delete your account if you still wish to.