Delete your LincYou account
This page explains how to delete your LincYou account and your data, what is deleted, what is kept, and for how long.
Delete your account from inside the app
- Open LincYou and sign in.
- Go to the Me tab → the gear icon → Settings.
- Tap Account security.
- Tap Delete account.
- Type your account's email address to confirm, then tap Delete account.
That is the whole flow — there is no form to fill in and nothing to wait for.
What happens, and when
Immediately. You are signed out on every device — phone, tablet and web — and the account can no longer be used. Push notifications to your devices stop.
For the next 30 days. Your account is scheduled for deletion. Nothing is erased yet, and you can cancel by simply signing in again with the same email address. Signing in cancels the deletion; there is nothing else to do. We also email your account's address when a deletion is scheduled, so that if someone else ever did this, you can undo it.
Because nothing is erased during those 30 days, your profile and the posts and comments you have already published stay visible to other members until the erasure runs. Nobody can sign in to the account, post from it or message from it in the meantime. If you want something gone sooner than the 30 days, delete it yourself before you delete the account — see Delete some of your data below.
After 30 days. Your account and its data are permanently erased. This cannot be undone, and we cannot restore an erased account.
What is deleted
Permanently, after the 30-day period:
- your profile — name, handle, photo, date of birth, education details, interests, help topics and timeline milestones;
- your posts and comments, including their photos, videos and reactions;
- the messages you sent, and your membership of chats and clubs;
- your photos, videos and documents in our file storage;
- your follows and followers, saved posts, likes, badges and uCoins;
- your courses and any university-verification documents you uploaded;
- your notifications and your push-notification registrations;
- your sessions (already ended on day one).
What is kept, and why
A small amount of information outlives the account. None of it is your profile and — with one narrow exception, named below where it belongs — none of it is your content:
- Safety reports. If you reported someone, or someone reported you, the report is kept as a safety record with your identity removed from it. Safety records have to outlive the accounts involved, or a person could erase the record of their own conduct by opening a new account.
- Other people's conversations. A chat you took part in stays for the other participants, minus the messages you sent. The narrow exception: the chat list shows a one-line preview of each conversation's most recent message, and that preview is stored with the conversation — so if the last message was yours, that single line may remain in the other participant's chat list until a newer message replaces it.
- Shared university data. If you added a program or a course to the shared campus catalogue, that entry stays for the students using it, with your name removed.
- Moderation records. Our staff's record of moderation decisions is kept. It records what was done and by which staff member, never your content.
- Material under a legal hold. If content has been preserved because the law requires it (child-safety reporting obligations), it is retained apart from ordinary content for up to one year, and your erasure is completed once the hold is lifted or expires. This is rare and we do not choose it — it is a legal duty that outranks a deletion request.
- Backups. Erased data can persist in encrypted database backups for a short operational window before those backups roll over. It is not accessible in the app and is never restored selectively.
If you cannot open the app, or need help
Email support@lincyou.com from any address, naming the email address the account uses, and we will help you.
How we verify it is your account. We never delete an account on the strength of an email asking us to — anyone could send that. Proof is control of the account's own email address, which is also exactly what signing in to LincYou requires: the one-time code goes to that address and nowhere else. So the answer to almost every request is the same, and it is the strongest verification there is — we will walk you through signing in and deleting the account yourself, from whichever device you have.
If you ask us to delete an account that is not yours, nothing happens to it. There is no staff button that deletes an account, and there is nothing you can tell us that would substitute for the code we send to the account's own mailbox.
If you have lost access to that mailbox as well, say so in your message. We will ask you for other information about the account and decide case by case — we cannot promise a deletion in advance of that, because the alternative is deleting people's accounts for strangers who ask convincingly.
However a deletion is reached, it follows exactly the same 30-day process as the in-app one, including the ability to cancel it by signing in.
Delete some of your data without deleting your account
You do not have to delete your account to remove things from LincYou:
- Posts and comments. Open your own post or comment, tap the ⋯ menu and choose Delete. It is removed from LincYou, along with the photos and videos attached to it.
- Photos and videos. Deleting the post that carries them deletes the files. Changing your profile photo replaces the old one.
- Profile details. Edit your profile in the Me tab to change or clear your photo, name, interests, help topics, courses and timeline entries.
- Push notifications. Turn off notification types in Settings → Notifications, or turn LincYou's notifications off in your phone's own settings. Signing out of a device removes that device's push registration.
- Sessions. Settings → Account security → Sign out of other devices ends every session except the one you are using.
- Chat messages. Individual messages cannot be deleted once sent, because a chat is a shared record between two people. Deleting your account removes your messages from every chat you were in.
If you want a copy of your data, or have a question about any of the above, email support@lincyou.com.
Questions
Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect and why, and our Terms of Service govern the use of LincYou.
Privacy questions: support@lincyou.com