Delete your account

What gets deleted

Deleting removes both halves of your account, not just the visible one:

• Your identity and everything scoped to it. Your profile and handle, your verified and claimed accounts, your disavowals, your anchor details, your directory listing, every version of your signed manifest along with its history, and the redirects that kept your old handles working.
• The login itself. The account at our authentication provider is deleted too, and that is the thing holding your email address. Deletion is not just a row in our database going quiet.

It cannot be undone, and we cannot restore any of it afterwards. Export your data as JSON first if you want a record.

If you still have your signing key

Delete it yourself, in seconds, from either place you use RealHandles:

• On the web: your dashboard, Data tab, under Delete identity.
• In the Android app: the Data section, under End this identity.

You will be asked to type your exact handle, and your key signs the deletion. That signature is required on purpose: a login on its own can never erase an identity, so a stolen session cannot destroy something it was never able to forge.

If you have lost your signing key

Then the self-serve buttons above cannot work for you, because there is no key left to sign with. Request deletion instead:

Request account deletion

Send the request from the email address on your RealHandles login and include the handle you want removed. Controlling that mailbox is what we check, since it is the only thing left that ties you to the account.

This route is deliberately slower and handled by a person. An automatic request form that skipped the signature check would be the same hole the signature exists to close, so the check moves to a human rather than disappearing. We act on verified requests within 30 days and reply to the address you wrote from.

What survives, honestly

A RealHandles manifest is portable by design, which is the whole point of it and also the limit of what deletion can reach. Once it is deleted here, three things can still exist in the world, and we would rather you knew that now than found out later:

• Copies hosted somewhere else. A manifest you published on your own domain as an anchor, a copy someone saved, or a page a search engine or archive cached. Those live on servers we do not control, so they stay wherever they were placed. Take down the ones that are yours; the rest we genuinely cannot reach.
• The Bitcoin timestamps. Published versions have their hashes committed to the Bitcoin blockchain, so that the history could not be backdated by anyone, us included. A commitment is a hash and nothing else, carrying none of your data, and nobody can remove one from a public chain.
• Your key, if you still hold it. Deleting the account does not destroy your key or invalidate anything it ever signed. If you want the key gone as well, delete your encrypted backup file and clear the app or browser data holding it.

Deleting less than everything

If you only want part of it gone, you do not need this page. Remove an individual account, hide it from your profile, or change your display name from your dashboard. Hidden accounts are never published anywhere.

See our Privacy Policy for what we collect and how long we keep it, and our Terms of Service.