Deleting your account

How to delete it

1. Sign in at members.wsdba.org, or open the WSDBA Member Portal app.
2. Go to Account.
3. Scroll to Delete account.
4. Type DELETE, enter your password to confirm it is you, and confirm.

Deletion happens immediately and cannot be undone. There is no waiting period and no recovery window, so export your data first if you want a copy. The Export my data button on the same screen downloads, in one click, your account details, your listing and its photographs, every enquiry the public has sent you, your listing’s daily view counts, your subscription and payment records, the devices you have notifications turned on for, and the audit entries that name you — as a single file. For security it does not include your password (which is stored only as an irreversible hash), your two-factor secret, or the encryption keys that belong to each notification device.

One exception: association staff accounts

If your account holds a staff role on the portal — owner, administrator, editor or viewer — the Delete account panel explains that it cannot be deleted from that screen, because doing so would take the association’s own administrative access with it. Email members@wsdba.org from the address on the account instead: the association owner removes the staff role and the same erasure described below is carried out for you. Every member who is not staff deletes their own account from the screen above, immediately, without asking anyone.

What is erased

• Your name, email address and phone number.
• Your password and your two-factor authentication secret.
• Your public business listing — it comes off the directory, the home page and the sitemap straight away, along with your logo, cover image and every gallery photograph, which are deleted from storage rather than merely unlinked.
• Every enquiry the public sent you through your listing, including the sender’s details.
• The notification tokens for every device you had notifications turned on for.
• The sign-in sessions on every device you were still signed in on.
• Your name, email address and phone number are stripped out of the security audit entries and the mailing-list delivery log, so what remains in those records is the fact that an action happened, not who it happened to.

Your pin on the district map

Your member listing comes down immediately, and with it your logo, your photographs, your description and every way of contacting you. The map pin for the address itself is not deleted: it reverts to an unclaimed Water Street business, showing only the business name and its category, exactly as it did before you joined. We keep those unclaimed pins so the district map stays complete and so the business can be claimed later — by you, or by whoever operates from that address next. Nothing about you personally remains attached to it. If the business has closed and you want the pin taken off the map entirely, email members@wsdba.org and we will remove it.

The association mailing list

When you delete your account we immediately ask our email marketing provider to remove you from the association’s mailing list. That provider is a separate company and we cannot guarantee how quickly it acts on the request, so if a mailing does reach you afterwards, every one of them carries an unsubscribe link that takes effect at once.

What happens to your membership

If you have an active paid subscription, deleting your account cancels it so that you are not billed again. Deleting your account does not refund the unused part of a term you have already paid for, and your listing comes down immediately rather than running to the end of the term. If you only want to stop the next renewal and keep your listing until the term ends, cancel from Billing instead of deleting.

In the rare case that our payment processor cannot be reached at the moment you delete, your account is still deleted — we will not hold your deletion hostage to somebody else’s outage — and the failed cancellation is recorded for staff to complete by hand. If you are ever charged after deleting, email members@wsdba.org and we will cancel and refund that charge.

What we keep, and why

• Financial records — the amounts, dates, and our payment processor’s reference for each payment and refund. Tax and accounting law requires us to keep these, and the processor’s reference is what lets us match a record to a real charge if you or a tax authority ever query one. They are kept without your name, email address or phone number attached. Be aware that this is not the same as being anonymous: the processor’s reference is a key in the processor’s own system, so Stripe — and we, by asking Stripe — could still match that record back to you.
• Security audit entries — the record that certain actions happened on an account. When you delete, we go back through the entries that name you and strip your name, email address, phone number and IP address out of them, so what is left is the action and its date.
• Records held by our payment processor. Stripe keeps its own transaction record under its own retention policy; that is outside our control.
• Email already sent. We cannot recall messages that have already been delivered to other people — for example an enquiry we forwarded to you, or an announcement sent to the membership.
• Search engine copies. Your listing is removed from our site immediately, but Google and other search engines may keep a cached copy until they next crawl the page.

If you cannot sign in

Use password reset first — it is the fastest route back in. If you still cannot reach your account, email members@wsdba.org from the address on the account and we will verify you and delete it for you.

For the full picture of what we collect and why, see our Privacy Policy.