Deleting your Hearth account
Your account lives on your family's server, not with us. Hearth is self-hosted, so the people who make the app hold no accounts and no data. Deleting your account removes it from the server you signed in to, and you can do that yourself from inside the app.
Delete it in the app
- Open Hearth and go to the You tab.
- Tap Privacy & data.
- Tap Delete my account.
- Enter your password to confirm.
The account is deleted straight away and every device signed in to it is signed out. If you want a copy first, tap Export my data on the same screen. It downloads your profile, circles, location history, trips, check-ins and the places you created as a JSON file.
What is deleted
- Your account, email address, name and password.
- Your current position and your whole location history.
- Your trips, check-ins, SOS alerts, and arrival and departure history.
- Your signed-in devices and their notification registrations.
- Your membership of every circle.
- Circles you own that have nobody else in them. A circle shared with other people passes to its longest-standing admin instead, or to its longest-standing member if it has no admin, so the rest of the family keeps it.
What is kept
A few things belong to a circle rather than to you, so they stay with the circle.
- Lines in a circle's activity feed, such as "Sarah arrived at Home", lose their link to your account but keep the text, which usually includes your name. A check-in line also keeps the position it was sent with. They go when the circle is deleted.
- Places you created in a shared circle stay, because the rest of the circle uses them.
- The server's admin audit log keeps its record of admin actions, and of any sign-in token reused on one of your devices, with the IP address each came from.
- Your profile photo file is no longer linked to anything, but it stays in the server's storage until the operator clears it, and anyone who already has its link can still open it.
Backups are outside the app's reach. If the server's operator keeps backups, your data stays in them until those backups expire.
Delete only your location history
To keep your account but erase where you have been, go to You, Privacy & data, Erase my location history. That removes your breadcrumbs and the trips worked out from them.
If you can't open the app
Ask the person who runs your Hearth server. That is often whoever in your family set Hearth up. They can switch your account off straight away in the server's admin tools and remove it from the server's database. The Hearth project has no copy of your account and can't delete it for you, because it never had it.
Questions
Read the full privacy policy, or open an issue at github.com/Qureshi-DH/hearth/issues.