Delete your PsychologyOrbit account

You can delete your account yourself at any time, on the website or in the app. It takes effect straight away and cannot be undone.

How

On the website: sign in, open Settings, Your data, and use Delete your account. You will be asked for your password.
In the app: open your profile, then Settings, then Delete account, and enter your password.
If you cannot sign in (you lost access to your email, or forgot your password and cannot reset it): use the contact form, choose General question, write “Delete my account” as the subject, and send it from the email address the account uses. We confirm it is your account before deleting it, because deleting somebody else's account on request would be an easy way to attack them.

What is deleted

Your name, email address, username, photo, headline and everything on your profile.
Your education, work history, specialisations and ORCID.
Verification requests and every document you uploaded for them.
Who you follow and who follows you, connections, blocks, bookmarks, reactions, notifications, community memberships, job applications and event registrations.
Every signed-in session, on the website and in the app.
Your supervised-hours logbooks, your CPD record and the certificates you uploaded to it, your confirmed university, the conditions you listed as working with, and your requests for other people's full texts.

Your posts, comments, research and the messages you sent

You choose, on the website and in the app alike. Keep them (the default), credited to “Deleted member”, so the discussions and conversations other people rely on still make sense; or delete them with the account, including every message you sent. Research that is deleted is withdrawn: its files are deleted, and its citable page says it was withdrawn, so a citation somebody already made still explains what happened.

What is kept, and for how long

Anything of yours that is under an open report is kept, hidden from everyone, until a moderator has reviewed it. Otherwise someone could post abuse and then delete their account to take the evidence with them.
A conversation is deleted, messages and all, once everyone in it has deleted their account, because nobody is left who could read it.
If you signed off someone else's supervised hours, their logbook stays theirs. It just no longer names your account.
Edits you made to the knowledge base stay, credited to “Deleted member”.
If you are a co-author on research somebody else published, your name stays in its author list as a plain name, no longer linked to any account. Removing an author would misstate who wrote the work.
Security logs (sign-in times, IP address, browser) are kept for 12 months from when each entry was made, then deleted automatically, so abuse can still be investigated.

The full details are in the privacy policy. Questions: contact us.