Delete your account

From inside the app

This is the fastest route and the one to prefer, because the app already knows which account is yours and nobody has to establish that by email.

• Open Alma.
• Go to Settings — the last tab.
• Scroll to data & legal and tap Delete account.
• Confirm. If you have signed in with an email address, you will be asked to type it. If you have not — which is how Alma works until you choose otherwise — you will be asked to type the account id shown on the screen. Either way it is one field and one button, and there is nothing to wait for.

It happens immediately. The app returns to its first screen with no account behind it, the way it was before you opened it the first time.

One exception, while it lasts: on iPhone and iPad, an account that has never signed in is still asked to sign in first, and the same is true of the export button beside it. That is this app rather than the rule — the server deletes a guest account on the same terms as any other — and until it is changed, the letter below does the job with no sign-in of any kind.

You do not need an email address to do this

Worth saying plainly, because it is the thing most likely to go wrong. Alma creates an account on the server the first time the app talks to it — before any sign-in screen, and before you have typed anything. That account is where your birth date, your birth coordinates and your readings are kept. If you never signed in, it has no email address on it at all.

That account can be deleted exactly like any other, and the rule is that you are never asked to supply an email address first: asking for more personal data as the price of removing the data already taken would be the wrong way round. The one app that has not caught up with that rule is named above, and writing to us goes round it.

By writing to us

If the app is uninstalled, or the phone is gone, or the screen in front of you is asking for a sign-in you do not have, or you would simply rather ask a person: write to hello@pazl.ai from the address you signed in with and say that you want your account deleted. We will do it and reply to confirm. A person reads it — support says how long that takes and what to include.

If you never signed in there is no address to write from, and the account cannot be found without the device that holds its token — so please use the in-app route while you still have the app. If you have already uninstalled it, write anyway and tell us what you can; we will look, and we will tell you honestly whether we found anything.

If you have a subscription, cancel it first

Deleting your Alma account does not cancel a subscription bought in a store. That subscription belongs to your Apple or Google account rather than to your Alma account, and it goes on renewing after everything here is gone — paying for access to an account that no longer exists.

So stop it first, on the store’s own screen. The two taps are in subscription terms, with both addresses. Cancelling there and deleting here are two separate acts, in that order.

What is deleted

Everything on this list goes, and it goes for good — none of it is recoverable:

• Your account row, and your email address if you gave one.
• Your birth date, birth time, birth coordinates, time zone and place label — and the same fields for anybody else you saved in order to compare charts.
• Your name, if you gave one.
• Every reading Alma wrote for you.
• Every conversation you had with Alma, and the short memory kept from them.
• Your sign-in links, used and unused.
• The counters and funnel steps recorded against your account.
• Your entitlements. This is the one worth reading twice: deleting the account deletes what you bought. A door you paid for permanently is permanent until you delete the account it belongs to, and there is no way for us to give it back afterwards.

What survives, and why

Three things, and none of them is a copy of your chart.

• The payment records. A purchase is a financial record and the law requires it to be kept for a number of years that depends on where we and you are. What is kept is the money — amount, currency, date, product, the store’s or processor’s own transaction id — with the link to you severed and the message the seller sent us about the payment wiped. It is no longer possible to go from those rows back to a person.
• A stub of your account row. The row itself is kept with your address and your name removed and everything hanging off it deleted, so that a sign-in link clicked a minute after you deleted the account gets a clear answer rather than silently making you a new person.
• The store’s own record. If you bought through Google Play or the App Store, the store keeps its record of that purchase under its own policy and we cannot delete it for you. Their account settings are where that lives.

Backups are the honest exception to “immediately”. Deleted data is removed from the live database at once and ages out of encrypted backups within 30 days, after which it is gone from there too. The privacy policy states the same window, from the same constant, so the two cannot drift apart.

If you only want a copy first

Settings has an Export my data button above the delete one. It writes everything Alma holds about you to one file — your account, every profile with its birth data, what you bought, every reading, every conversation and everything Alma remembers — which is worth doing before deleting rather than after. There is no after.

The server opens export to a guest account on exactly the same terms as deletion, and for the same reason: asking for an email address as the price of seeing what we already took would be the wrong way round. The iPhone and iPad exception above applies to this button too.

The full list of what Alma holds and where it goes is in the privacy policy.

Who this is

Alma is operated by Pazl LLC. The deletion request goes to the same people who built it; there is no third party in between and no ticket queue to escalate through.