Your account
Deleting your Nova account
You can delete your account yourself, at any time, from inside the app. It removes your treatment record permanently and it does not need our permission or a reason. Clinic reviews you have written are anonymised rather than deleted — see below.
In the app
- Open Nova and tap your profile picture, top right.
- Choose Delete my account permanently.
- Read what will be removed, then type DELETE to confirm.
If you signed in more than an hour ago you will be asked to sign in again first. That is deliberate: deletion cannot be undone, and it should not be possible for somebody who picks up an unlocked phone.
If you cannot sign in
Email support@heynova.org from the address on the account and ask us to delete it. We will verify that the address is yours before anything is removed, and we will confirm when it is done. We aim to respond within 30 days, and usually far sooner.
What is deleted
All of it, from the live database, straight away. This is a real cascading deletion rather than an archive or a hidden flag:
- Every cycle, stage, outcome and transfer detail
- Medications, schedules and every individual dose you logged
- Appointments, milestones, results and treatment events
- Journal entries and symptoms
- Embryo records and egg batches
- Clinic contacts and your notes from calls
- Your sign-in identity, so the account cannot be used again
- Any support person’s access, severed immediately
- Reminder subscriptions, so notifications stop
- Usage data, if you ever switched it on
What is kept, and why
Three things, and we would rather name them than let you find out later.
Clinic reviews you have written. These are not deleted with your account. They are anonymised: the link between the review and you is removed, and what you wrote stays on the clinic’s page. A review is a public statement about a clinic, and somebody choosing that clinic in three years is entitled to read it — deleting accounts would empty the record one person at a time.
If you would rather a review did not stay up, withdraw it before you delete your account. Withdrawing takes it off the site. You can do that from the Clinics tab, under “Your reviews”, at any time while your account exists — afterwards there is no longer any way to connect you to it, which is the point of anonymising it and also the reason we cannot do it for you later.
A deletion receipt. The date, which tables were affected and how many rows were removed from each. Counts and table names only — never the content of what was deleted. It exists so we can show a deletion was actually carried out.
The stage totals. We keep a running count of how many cycles reach each stage of treatment, by month and treatment type. There is no column for a person in it and no link to one, so there is nothing of yours in those numbers to remove — a total that thousands of people have added to holds no record of who they were.
Reviews you have published are handled separately, because they are about a clinic rather than about you and other patients rely on them. Ask us and we will remove them too.
Backups
Deleting your account removes your records from the live database immediately. Encrypted backups expire on their own schedule, currently 7 days, and are never used to restore a deleted account.
We say this plainly rather than implying data vanishes everywhere the moment you press the button. No system that takes backups can honestly promise instant global erasure, and we would rather tell you that than write a sentence that sounds better.
Take your record with you first
Deletion cannot be undone, and fertility treatment records get more useful over time. Before you delete, you can export everything from inside the app — a machine-readable file and a readable summary — without asking us. It sits next to the deletion option for exactly this reason.
The full detail is in our privacy notice. For anything else, write to support@heynova.org.