Account Deletion

When you delete your account we erase your personal data — your email address and display name. We do not reclaim or resell your coordinates: you bought them permanently and they stay charted. You choose, for each system, whether its content keeps rendering anonymously or is blanked back to procedural space. We keep the financial record of what you paid for six years because the law requires it, with your personal details stripped from it. Stripe keeps its own copy of your payment records, which our deletion does not reach.

The rest of this page sets out exactly what that means.

The 30 days

Deleting an account happens in two stages. When you confirm, your account is marked for deletion and you are signed out everywhere. 30 days later it is erased for good. Until then you can change your mind.

Your display name is erased at once.
Your email address is kept for those 30 days, and only so that you can sign in and restore the account. It is erased when the 30 days are up.

The 30 days exist because we sell permanence. A stolen session or a click made in a bad moment must not be able to destroy a memorial forever.

If we still owe you marketplace money when you delete, we keep a record of it and your email address until we have settled it with you, even if that is after the 30 days.

The erasure runs once a day, so it happens within about a day of the date we show you, not at the exact minute.

While your account is marked for deletion you cannot buy anything. Restore the account first.

Restoring your account

Sign in with the same email address before the date we show you, and choose to restore the account. Signing in does not restore it by itself. After that date it cannot be restored.

Restoring brings back the content of any system you blanked. It does not bring back:

your display name, which you can set again;
a star logo that was still waiting for review when you deleted the account, which you would need to upload again;
per-planet click counts and any logo rejected in the meantime;
the subscriptions we cancelled for you.

Restored links are checked for safety again before they become clickable.

What happens to your systems

We never reclaim or resell a coordinate. A system whose owner has deleted their account is still an owned system. It never shows as unclaimed and it never shows a buy control.

For each system, you choose one of two things.

Keep it. The system carries on exactly as it is, without your name: it is shown as charted anonymously. It is not hidden at any point.
Blank it. The system's name, colours, star logo or monogram, cosmetic upgrades and every planet's name, tooltip and link are hidden from public view straight away. The screen shows plain generated space, still marked as charted anonymously.

A blanked system's content is hidden, not destroyed. We keep it privately for the 30 days so that restoring your account brings it back. When the 30 days are up it is permanently erased, including any upgrades you paid for on that system.

A name, colours or links you add to a blanked system during the 30 days are replaced by the saved content if you restore, and erased with it if you do not.

What we cannot take back during those 30 days:

a copy another site already made, such as a preview image on social media or a snippet in a search engine;
the star logo image file, for someone who already has its direct address. It is removed when the 30 days are up.

The galaxy map and search can take a few minutes to catch up with a blank.

Systems that cannot be blanked

Four kinds of system are always kept, whatever you choose.

A system we are reviewing after a report. It stays exactly as it is, and is not hidden or erased by deleting your account.
A memorial or other protected system, including a memorial bought recently that has not yet become permanently protected. A memorial is usually bought for someone else.
A gift that has not been claimed yet. It is held by us for the recipient, not by your account, and the link to claim it is already in their inbox. Only the recipient's email address can claim it.
A system with an active vanity URL. A paid address would otherwise lead to nothing. If you want that system blanked, cancel the vanity URL and wait for it to end before you delete your account.

What we cancel for you

Your vanity URLs are cancelled automatically. Each keeps working until the end of the period you have already paid for.

Referral credit can only be spent on upgrades, and is lost with the account.

What is erased when the 30 days are up

your sign-in record, which is where your email address is held;
your display name, again, in case you set one in the meantime;
the fingerprint of your payment card that we hold to detect self-dealing;
the record of who referred you;
rate-limit counters kept against your account;
your email address on any gift you claimed;
the links to your payment receipts;
the content of every system you blanked, and the logo files you uploaded for those systems.

What we keep, and why

We keep the record of each order for up to six years after the end of the company financial year the record relates to, as HMRC requires for company tax records. Article 17(3)(b) of the UK GDPR allows data to be kept where a legal obligation requires it. The record is also what lets us answer a chargeback and match our books to Stripe's.

What survives on an order record:

the order's own reference;
your account's internal identifier, a random reference that no longer has a name or an email address attached to it;
what kind of purchase it was;
the amount, the currency and the status;
the date and time of the order;
Stripe's references for the checkout and the payment;
what was sold: the coordinate, the upgrade or the vanity URL. A vanity URL is kept as sold, even if the name you chose was your own.

A star name, a dedication and a recipient's email address are removed from your order records when you delete, and the receipt link is removed when the 30 days are up.

Some other records are kept under the same internal identifier, because they are records of money or ownership, or of something you told us about someone else's content: your Stripe customer reference, your credits, sector-name claims, and any reports you sent us.

A gift you bought without signing in is not tied to your account, so deleting your account does not change it. The details on gift orders are handled separately. A dedication on a star you were given is part of that system's content: it stays if you keep the system and goes if you blank it.

On a gift order, the recipient's email address, the star name and the dedication are removed 12 months after the gift was sent if it is never claimed, or 30 days after it is claimed, and at once if the recipient deletes their account. A coded form of the recipient's email address (a one-way keyed code, not the address itself) is kept while the gift is unclaimed so that only that address can claim it, also after the readable address is removed, and is deleted when the gift is claimed. If the recipient asks us to erase their address from a gift not yet claimed, the address and its coded form are both removed; for a claimed gift the coded form was deleted when the gift was claimed, and the address on the gift goes 30 days after the claim. If the recipient deletes their account, the copy on the gift order goes at once, and the address on the gift itself when the 30 days of the deletion are up, if that is sooner.

Sign-in records are not in our database. Supabase, our sign-in provider, keeps them in its own service logs, with the IP address of each sign-in, and deletes them automatically after no more than 7 days. Deleting your account does not remove them sooner.

Erased data can remain in our daily database backups for up to 7 days before they are overwritten.

Stripe

Purchases sold through Onelink were paid to Onelink, Stripe's merchant-of-record service, which keeps its own records of them under its own privacy policy. Deleting your account here does not reach those records.

Questions

Your wider rights over your personal data are set out in the Privacy Notice.