You can delete your Grilled Cheese account and the data tied to it at any time. You do not need to ask us first, and you do not need to be able to sign in.

From the app

  1. Open Grilled Cheese and go to Settings.

  2. Choose Account, then Delete account.

  3. Confirm. You are signed out on every device straight away.

From the web

Sign in at https://grilledcheese.app and go to Settings → Account → Delete account. It is the same deletion and the same result.

If you cannot sign in

Losing access to your account does not cost you the right to have it erased. Write to [email protected] from the email address on the account, or tell us the handle, and we will verify what we can and delete it for you.

What is deleted

  • Your profile and every identity on the account: display names, bio, avatar and header images.

  • Your posts, replies, media and drafts, and anything you uploaded. Where someone else replied to one of your posts, the thread keeps an empty placeholder where your post was, so the conversation around it still makes sense. The words, the pictures and your name are gone from it.

  • Your encrypted conversations. We never hold the keys to these, so what is stored is unreadable ciphertext, and it goes with the account.

  • Your follows, followers, lists, blocks and mutes.

What we keep, and why

  • Your handle. It is retired rather than erased: it stops resolving to you, and nobody else can ever be given it. We keep it reserved because other servers go on pointing replies, mentions and links at a handle long after it is gone, and whoever took the name next would inherit them.

  • Moderation and safety records, including reports made about your account. Erasing these would let a banned account return by deleting itself.

  • Anything we are legally required to retain, for as long as we are required to retain it.

  • Your search history, with the link to your account removed for good. The terms and the times they were searched stay behind as an anonymous record; nothing connects them to you any more, and that cannot be undone or reversed.

  • Counts and statistics that no longer identify you, such as how many accounts posted on a given day.

Content that has already left our servers

Grilled Cheese is part of a federated network. Posts you made publicly may already have been copied to other servers, which we do not control and cannot compel. We stop serving your content, and we tell the servers we federate with — on both the ActivityPub and the atproto side of the network — that the account is gone. Most honour that. A copy someone else already holds is beyond our reach.

Your atproto identifier, the did:plc: string the wider network uses to know you, is marked dead in the public directory that holds it, which stops it resolving to you or to anything else. That directory only ever adds to itself: the record that the identifier existed, and the handles it once carried, stay published there. We cannot remove it, nobody else can either, and other people keep their own copies of the directory. This is the one part of deleting an account that we cannot do for you.

This is true of every federated network. It is worth knowing before you delete rather than after.

How long it takes

Your account is disabled the moment you confirm, and can no longer be used to sign in. Your content stops being served straight away.

Permanent erasure follows after a grace period of 30 days. That wait is not a cooling-off period you can use: there is no undo in the app or on the web, and the account cannot be signed in to while it waits. Derived data such as search indexes and analytics is purged within 90 days.

Backups age out on their own schedule, so a deleted account may persist in an encrypted backup for a short period after erasure. Nothing is restored from a backup into the live service.