You can delete your Vela account and the data associated with it at any time. This page describes how to do that, what gets removed, and what (if anything) is retained.
Delete from inside the app (recommended)
- Open the Vela app and sign in.
- Tap the Profile tab (bottom right).
- Open Settings (gear icon, top right of the Profile screen).
- Scroll to the bottom and tap Delete account.
- Confirm the deletion. The process runs immediately.
The deletion runs server-side as soon as you confirm. You'll be signed out and the account will be unrecoverable.
Delete without access to the app
If you have lost access to your device, your email, or the Vela app, email [email protected] from the email address on the Vela account. We will verify ownership and delete the account on your behalf, typically within 7 business days.
If you cannot email from the account email, include enough information for us to verify identity (the email you signed up with, an approximate sign-up date, the city on your profile). We may ask a follow-up question to confirm ownership before deleting.
What gets deleted
When your account is deleted, the following are permanently removed from Vela's systems:
- Your profile (name, bio, age, gender, intent, location)
- Your photos (profile photos, private-album photos, chat photos you sent)
- Your conditions disclosure and any health-data sharing keys
- Your AI-generated avatars and any reference photos
- Your matches and likes (both directions)
- Your chat messages (yours and your conversation partners' messages within shared conversations)
- Your bug reports and in-app feedback
- Your push notification token and device registration
- Your authentication record (email is removed; you can no longer sign in)
Health data note. Because health conditions are end-to-end encrypted with a key stored only on your device, destroying the key — which happens automatically on deletion — renders any ciphertext your matches received permanently unreadable. We cannot decrypt it ourselves, and your matches' apps will no longer be able to decrypt it either.
What is retained (and why)
A small set of records is retained for legal, safety, or accounting reasons. None of it identifies you to other users or appears in the app.
- Abuse and moderation reports: if you were reported by another user or filed a report against another user, the report record is kept indefinitely for community safety. The record references your deleted account ID (a UUID with no PII attached); your name, email, photos, and messages are gone.
- Subscription and payment receipts (when applicable, after the paid tier opens): retained for up to 7 years as required by Canadian and US tax law. The receipt references only a customer ID and amount — never your card details, which are held by Apple, Google, or our payment processor and never by Vela.
- Anonymized analytics events from product analytics (PostHog) and crash logs (Sentry): retained for up to 90 days, indexed by a SHA-256 hash of your user ID. The hash cannot be reversed back to your identity once the account is deleted.
- Server access logs from our backend (Supabase): retained for up to 30 days for security investigation, then automatically deleted. These logs contain IP addresses and request paths, not your personal data.
Your face-verification selfies are not retained at all — they are deleted immediately after the liveness decision is made (or within 7 days if flagged for manual review, then auto-deleted).
Timeline
- In-app deletion: immediate. The account is unusable within seconds of confirming.
- Email deletion: up to 7 business days after we verify the request.
- Backup retention: our cloud provider (Supabase) keeps encrypted backups for up to 7 days. After 7 days, no copy of your account exists anywhere on Vela's systems.
Reactivation
For 30 days after deletion, you can reactivate by signing in with the same email. If you sign in within that window, the app will offer a one-tap reactivation. After 30 days, the hard delete runs and reactivation is no longer possible — you would need to create a new account.
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