This page is how to delete your people you know account. It is a page rather than only a screen in the app because you may not have the app any more: an uninstalled app, a lost phone or an address you can no longer read are all reasons to be asking, and none of them should stand in the way.

Last updated: 27 September 2026. This page covers the closed beta.

If you only want to delete one photograph, or one comment, that is further down and it does not need us at all.

In the app

settings → delete my account. It asks once, and then it is done. Deleting is immediate and it is not reversible.

If you cannot get into the app

Write to pykapp+privacy@proton.me from the email address on the account and say that you want it deleted. That address is the one your sign-in codes go to, so a message from it shows what signing in would have shown. We delete the account within 30 days and write back when it is done.

If the account has no address, or you have lost it, write from any address and give the handle you used. We will ask you for something only that account’s owner could know, and we will refuse if it does not come: an account that anybody can delete by naming it is worse for you than a wait of a day or two.

What deleting does

  • Every key that let anybody open your posts is destroyed at once, and so are the keys that let you open theirs.
  • Your posts, comments and reactions are gone for everyone straight away.
  • Your connections are severed and your groups are removed.
  • Albums you made are closed, and the people in them keep what they already had from each other.
  • Every phone you were signed in on is signed out.
  • Your handle and any email address are freed, and any key made from a password is deleted.

Eight days later the encrypted files are removed from storage. Those eight days are not an undo: the keys were destroyed at the tap and nothing in the product can restore them. A deleted row can outlive the tap in a backup of our database or in the output of something we ran by hand, for the 35 and 90 days those are kept. The second copy of the encrypted files keeps each file for 30 days after it leaves storage, so the last of them is gone within six weeks of the tap. Signing in during that time with the same address starts a new, empty account.

What we keep afterwards carries your name, handle, address and keys on none of it, and the privacy policy lists all of it: that the account existed, blocks, reports, who invited whom and the country on your invitation, the add requests you sent and received, when you signed in, and the rows of your posts and comments marked deleted.

Deleting a post, a comment or a picture

Each of these happens in the app, the moment you tap it. It takes effect for everybody at once, and none of it can be undone.

  • A post: more → delete for everyone. Every key that let anybody open it is destroyed at that moment, yours and every recipient’s. The encrypted files are removed from storage eight days later and from the second copy within six weeks, as they are when an account goes.
  • A comment: delete, beside your own words. It stops being shown to anyone on that post. The sealed text stays until the post itself goes, unreadable to us the whole time.
  • A reaction: tap it again and it is removed outright.
  • Your name on somebody else’s post: more → remove my tag. That also takes back the name and picture the tag let them see.
  • Your profile picture: remove, on your own profile. Nobody can fetch it from that moment, and the file itself goes on the next sweep, within the hour, and from the second copy within five weeks.
  • Everything you have shared with one person: remove them, or block them, and every key between the two of you is destroyed in both directions.

What none of this reaches is a copy somebody already saved to their own phone. That is true of anything you share with anybody, here or elsewhere, and no setting can change it.

The privacy policy says what we hold while the account is alive.