This page explains how to delete your mwoyo account and personal information, and what happens when you do. It supports the right to deletion under POPIA and Zimbabwe's Cyber and Data Protection Act, described in our Privacy Policy, and the data-deletion disclosure that app stores and platform providers require.
mwoyo is operated by Kalulus Investment (Pty) Ltd (registration number 2015/052417/07), which is responsible for deleting your data. That applies wherever you are and however you signed up.
How to request deletion
In the app: go to Settings, then Delete account, then Delete my account, and confirm.
By email: write to support@mwoyo.me from your account's login email, with the subject "Delete my account". If you cannot use that email, we will ask you to prove your identity another way before we act, so that nobody else can delete your account.
You can delete your account without deleting the app, and deleting the app does not delete your account.
What happens next: the 30-day grace period
Day 0, your request: your account is scheduled for deletion, and we email your login address to confirm it and give you the deletion date.
Days 1–30, the grace period: your account stays open, in case the request was a mistake. To cancel, sign in and choose Cancel deletion in Settings, or email us. We confirm cancellations by email.
Day 30, permanent deletion: your account and personal information are permanently and irreversibly deleted, and we send a final confirmation email.
If you want your data gone sooner than 30 days, email us and we will delete it as soon as we reasonably can, once we have confirmed the request is yours.
What is deleted
your profile: name, login email, username, photo, wallpaper, email signature and settings;
your mwoyo addresses and aliases;
your messages, conversations, attachments and uploaded files;
your contacts, groups and tasks;
your sign-in sessions, 2FA settings, backup codes, recovery phone number and recovery email;
your connected WhatsApp and SMS numbers, WhatsApp consent records, and your devices' push-notification tokens;
your answers, votes and progress in interactive messages; and
connected external mailboxes, including their stored passwords and the record of which of their messages were brought in.
Messages between mwoyo users are encrypted with keys protected by your password. Once your keys are deleted, your copies of those messages cannot be recovered by anyone, including us.
What is not deleted, and why
Other people's copies. Messages you sent to other people stay in their mailboxes, the same as with any email service. This includes people outside mwoyo, whose email providers we do not control.
Billing records. Payment references and invoices are kept for the period tax law requires (currently at least five years), and are not used for anything else.
The do-not-send list. If an address bounced or reported our email as spam, we keep that address so we do not email it again. Tell us if you want yours removed.
Legal holds. We keep records if we are legally required to, or if they are needed for an ongoing dispute, fraud or abuse investigation, and only for as long as that lasts.
Server logs, which may contain IP addresses. These are removed on their normal cycle of up to 90 days.
Anything we keep is limited to what is necessary, restricted to the people who need it, and deleted once it is no longer required.
Backups
We do not currently keep separate backup copies of the mwoyo database. If we introduce backups, deleted data will be removed from them within 30 days of permanent deletion.
Our service providers
Personal information stored with the providers that host mwoyo on our behalf (Amazon Web Services and MongoDB Atlas, in Cape Town) is deleted as part of the process above. We also instruct our other providers, including any local support partner you contacted, to delete personal information they hold about you for us, unless they must keep it by law. Messages already delivered by WhatsApp or SMS, and data held by services you connected yourself, are governed by those services and must be deleted with them directly.
Contact
Questions or requests: support@mwoyo.me. If you are not satisfied with how we handle your request, you can complain to the Information Regulator (South Africa) or POTRAZ (Zimbabwe). See the Privacy Policy.