Delete your Afer account

How to delete your account

The option is inside every Afer app, on the account tab.

You can delete your Afer account whenever you want, and the option is inside the app itself. Open the account tab, go to Settings, and choose Delete account. The same control is in all three apps: the one you order and ride with, the driver app, and the rider app. Deleting from any of them closes the one account behind all three.

You will be asked to confirm, and to prove it is you with your password, a code or your phone. The confirmation words on their own are the same in every copy of the app and prove nothing, so asking for proof is what stops a stolen session from starting your deletion behind your back. You stay signed in afterwards, on purpose: the 30 days below exist for you to change your mind, and you have to be able to get back in to do it.

We will not let you delete an account with your money still in it. If the wallet holds anything we can give back, the deletion is refused and we open a request to return it: what you earned is paid out the way a withdrawal is, and what you put in by card goes back to that card. Once it has reached you, the deletion goes ahead. Credit we handed you ourselves, a promotion or a goodwill voucher, is the one thing that cannot be returned, because there is no card and no bank account to send it to. That part is given up when the account closes, and the app shows you the figure before you confirm.

Deleting your account is permanent. When the 30 days described below have passed, we cannot bring the account back, and neither can you. Your order history, your ratings and your saved addresses go with it.

If you cannot open the app

Request it by email or from the support form, without installing anything.

If you have already uninstalled the app, lost the phone, or cannot sign in for any other reason, you do not have to reinstall anything. Write to support@afer.app from the email address on the account, or send us the phone number you signed up with, and ask us to delete the account. You can also use the form at afer.app/support/request/, which gives you a reference code on submission.

We will check that the request really comes from the account holder before we act on it. That check is the reason there is no button on this page that deletes an account outright: a deletion we accepted from an anonymous visitor would be a way to delete somebody else's account, and asking who you are is what stops it.

Once we have confirmed it is your account, the request follows exactly the same path as one made in the app, including the 30 days. You get an answer the same business day. We do not send a second message when the erasure itself runs, so count the 30 days from our answer as the window in which to change your mind.

What is deleted

Everything that identifies you, including your identity documents.

Everything that identifies you is removed. Your phone number, your email address, your name and nickname, your profile photograph, anything you wrote about yourself, and the approximate location on your profile are erased from our database rather than hidden.

• Your phone number, email address, name and profile photograph.
• Your identity documents and the selfie you sent with them, deleted from storage and not only unlinked.
• Every session and every device signed in to the account, revoked at once.
• Your saved addresses, your payment cards on file, and your notification settings.
• The text and the photographs you sent in chats, blanked where the message stays so the other person's conversation does not develop a hole.
• Your listings and anything you offered for sale, taken off the market.
• Anything you posted in the community, removed and emptied.

Identity documents are worth naming on their own, because they are the most sensitive thing we hold. A driving licence, an identity card, a vehicle registration or an insurance certificate you sent us is destroyed in storage, not merely detached from your row. We keep the fact that a document was checked and when, because that is what answers a regulator asking whether we verified a driver, and we keep no picture of it.

What is kept, and why

The records the law requires us to hold, with your name taken out of them.

A few records survive, and only because the law requires it or because somebody else has a right to them. None of them carries your name after the deletion.

• Completed orders and trips: the amount, the date and the outcome, which tax and accounting law makes us keep. The customer on them becomes an anonymous account.
• Invoices we have already issued, which are frozen documents and cannot be edited after the fact.
• Reviews you left about a driver, a restaurant or a seller, kept against an anonymised author so that somebody else's reputation does not lose the record.
• Reports about safety or fraud, for as long as they are needed, because deleting an account must not erase a complaint somebody made about it.
• Counts that are only numbers, such as how many people installed the app in a month, which identify nobody.

How long each of those is kept, and under which law, is set out in the privacy policy at afer.app/legal/privacy/. If you want a copy of everything we hold before you delete it, export your data first from the same Settings screen. After deletion there is nothing left to export.

The 30 days before it happens

Deletion is scheduled, not instant, and you can stop it by signing in.

Deletion is scheduled rather than immediate. For 30 days after you confirm, nothing is destroyed. The account is closed, you are signed out of every device, and it cannot be used, but the data is still there.

Those 30 days exist for one reason: people change their minds, and an account deleted by mistake at two in the morning should not be gone for good. Open the app, sign in, and cancel it from the same Settings screen. Nothing is lost and the account carries on as before. If you asked us by email instead, write again inside the window and we will stop it.

When the 30 days are up, the erasure runs by itself and is not reversible. We do not send a reminder before it runs, so if you are unsure, cancel now rather than later.

When deletion waits

Money still moving holds the request for days, never indefinitely.

There is one case where the erasure waits past the 30 days: money that is still moving. If we are holding a payment for a purchase that has not finished, or we still owe you a payout that has not landed, the deletion is held until that settles.

This protects both sides. Anonymising an account in the middle of a purchase would leave the other person without recourse and leave money with no owner to pay it to. So we finish the transaction first and delete afterwards.

It defers by days, never indefinitely, and the account stays closed and unusable the whole time. If you would rather it went faster, the quickest route is to let a pending purchase complete or to use up the balance, or withdraw earnings, before you ask. Write to support@afer.app if a deletion seems to be taking longer than that.