Data Retention & Deletion Policy

Last updated August 2026

What happens when you delete your account

Requesting deletion (Settings → Privacy → Delete my account) schedules erasure at least 48 hours later, as required by DPDP Rule 8(2). You can cancel any time before then. When it runs:

Your message content is scrubbed (not just detached from your name — the text itself is removed), while the conversation stays intact for participants who didn't request deletion.
Your profile, contacts, sessions, settings, reactions, and uploaded files (both the database record and the physical file) are deleted.
A minimal record — name, email, phone, registration IP — is kept separately, encrypted, for 180 days, then permanently purged. This isn't optional: IT Rules 2021 Rule 3(1) requires retaining registration information for 180 days after cancellation, and DPDP Section 8(7) explicitly permits this exact kind of legally-required retention.
Conversations, meetings, and groups you created aren't deleted just because you were the creator — they belong to everyone still in them, not solely to you.

Retention by data type

Data	Retained while	After account deletion
Profile (name, email, phone, bio, avatar)	Account is active	Erased; minimal registration record kept 180 days (see above)
Messages you sent	Conversation exists, or until you delete a message individually	Content scrubbed; conversation and other participants' messages remain
Files you uploaded	Until you delete it, or the account is deleted	Database record and physical file both removed
Meetings you hosted	Indefinitely (no auto-expiry currently)	Meeting record and other participants' data survive; your identity as host becomes an internal reference only, no longer publicly attributed
Contacts & contact requests	Until either party removes it, or an account is deleted	Removed
Notifications	Indefinitely — no automatic pruning is currently implemented	Removed with the account
Active sessions	Until logout, password change, or expiry	Removed with the account
Consent records	Permanently — this is a compliance record, kept even after account deletion (see Privacy Policy)	Survives; contains no re-identifiable data once the account is gone
Audit/access logs	Minimum 1 year, no shorter, per DPDP Rule 6/8	Survives, actor reference anonymized
WebRTC signaling data (call setup)	Transient — automatic cleanup is an optional cron job, not enabled by default (see project's INSTALL.md)	Removed with the account regardless
Password reset / verification tokens	1 hour to 7 days depending on type, then unusable — automatic row cleanup is an optional cron job	Removed with the account regardless

Requesting your data or its deletion

Both are self-service, from Settings → Privacy:

Download my data — a JSON file of your decrypted profile, sent messages, contacts, hosted meetings, uploaded files, and consent history.
Delete my account — as described above.

Something not covered by these tools? Contact our Grievance Officer.