Delete your account

You can delete your Mammaling account whenever you like, yourself, without asking anyone. This page explains how and, more importantly, what is erased and what is not — because in a scientific app that distinction matters.

How to delete it

In the app (quickest)

1. Open Mammaling and sign in.
2. Go to Profile → Settings.
3. At the bottom, Delete my account.
4. Confirm. Deletion is immediate; there is no waiting period.

By email, if you cannot sign in

If you have lost access to your account, write to [email protected] from the email address you registered with, asking for deletion. We will do it and confirm — within one month at the latest, and usually within a few days.

If you write from a different address we will have to verify somehow that the account is yours: we cannot delete someone's account because a third party asks us to.

What is erased

Data	What happens
Your email address and password	Erased.
Your profile: name, @username, biography, profile photo	Erased.
Your photographs and recordings	Both copies erased — the public one and the archive one.
Your private messages	Erased.
Your contacts and shared checklists	Erased.
Your subscription	Cancelled. The Stripe identifiers we held are deleted with the account.

What is NOT erased, and why

This is not a convenient exception for us; it is how biodiversity science works. Once a record has entered an open dataset and other researchers have used it in their analyses, withdrawing it would break their work. It is standard practice at GBIF and the other repositories, and it is what makes contributing a record worth more than a personal tally.

What disappears is the link to you: after deletion, that record carries no name, no @username and no route back to you. And you are told this before you confirm, inside the app — not in the small print.

Server technical logs (IP addresses and errors) are also kept for up to 12 months, because they are needed for the security of the service. Once the account is gone they are not linked to any profile.

If you only want to remove part of it

You do not need to delete the whole account to take something down:

• A photograph: open it and delete it. Both copies go.
• A checklist or an observation: delete it from the checklist itself.
• Your name, but not your data: set your profile to anonymous in Profile → Settings → Privacy. Your activity stays, without your name on it.
• The exact location: any checklist can be marked obscured (a grid of roughly 20 km) or private.

The full details are in the privacy policy.