Is there a way to close/remove (completely) an account?

[jeancarlozapata]

I didn't know where to ask about closing/removing an account, so I thought the web client would be a good place to ask.

This option is really important for me on any service with user accounts, and I guess other privacy-aware users would be interested to know, too

[deckar01]

@jeancarlozapata I agree. I will likely need to add an API endpoint for deleting accounts for another issue, so I will push to add a delete account feature to the settings page.

Can you provide some feedback on how you would want this feature to work?
Remind you to copy your secret key to prevent loosing funds?
Allow you to create a new account with an existing secret key?

[jeancarlozapata]

Thanks for replying @deckar01!

Can you provide some feedback on how you would want this feature to work?
Remind you to copy your secret key to prevent loosing funds?

I think this may be a good thing to do, emphasizing in the UI the importance of not loosing/giving away your key and saving it somewhere safe before actually deleting the account.

Allow you to create a new account with an existing secret key?

I'm not sure about the security implications of this (if any), but I believe this could potentially lead/encourage people to create or manage various accounts sharing the same key, which might be dangerous.

Let me know what you think

[jedmccaleb]

Do you mean deleting your account from our server or deleting your stellard address?

[deckar01]

@jedmccaleb

@jeancarlozapata posted:
This option is really important for me on any service with user accounts, and I guess other privacy-aware users would be interested to know, too

I believe he is referring to his user account not his Stellar address, but I'm curious what we should do when a user deletes their account.

1. Remind the user to keep their secret key for future use?
2. Offer to close their Stellar address and send the remaining balance elsewhere?

[jeancarlozapata]

@jedmccaleb posted:
Do you mean deleting your account from our server or deleting your stellard address?

I meant deleting the account from the server (which would "deattach" in some way the Stellar addresses from the account). But now that you point it out, I believe users should be able to remove
their accounts and their addresses separately, if they so desire. I know it can become "complicated" for some users to understand the distinction, though.

@deckar01 posted:
I believe he is referring to his user account not his Stellar address, but I'm curious what we should do when a user deletes their account.

1. Remind the user to keep their secret key for future use?
2. Offer to close their Stellar address and send the remaining balance elsewhere?

Both sound like good (and even expected) options/behaviours for end users.

[nullstyle]

Closing your account on our server definitely opens up some design questions around the stellar rewards system. We need to retain some information to ensure that a given facebook id doesn't get used twice to receive the free stellars.

We would also probably want to allow a user to dismiss the rewards pane, since they would not be able to progress through it if they were a user who previously closed their account and opened a new account.

[bekkibolthouse]

Closing this ticket; we've released the delete/merge feature in the client and API.