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.
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 deleted with it
Everything you recorded, and one thing people are often surprised by.
Clinic reviews you have written are deleted too — published or not — and each clinic’s scores are recalculated without them. Any reply a clinic wrote to one of your reviews goes with it, because a reply with nothing to answer is not worth leaving up.
If you want to keep a copy of what you wrote, export your data before you delete. The export includes every review, whatever its status, and it is the only copy you will have afterwards. If you would rather a review came down without deleting your whole account, withdraw it instead — Clinics tab, under “Your reviews”.
What is kept, and why
Two things, and we would rather name them than let you find out 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.