Last Updated: October 15, 2026
Each community keeps its own accounts; BeanPool keeps none of its own, except on the global community and, for sign-in recovery, in the key vault that phone apps built with it use. Your identity is a cryptographic keypair held on your own device, and your data lives on the community nodes you chose to join. That shapes how deletion works: most of it you can do yourself, immediately, from inside the app.
If you connected a publishing account so your public posts appear in your community's Pulse feed, there are two levels of removal.
In the phone app: Settings → Channels & Showcase, find the platform card, and tap Disconnect (it is there on a channel you verified by signing in to the platform). The web app has no Disconnect; use Remove, below.
This immediately deletes the platform access token from your device and clears the channel's verified status on the node. No further posts are retrieved. Posts already listed in the feed remain visible until you delete them or the channel, or until newer posts from the same channel push them out under the retention limit described below.
In the phone app: Settings → Channels & Showcase, open the platform card, and tap Remove. In the web app: Pulse → + Channels, and tap Remove.
This is the complete removal. The node immediately scrubs the channel record and every feed item imported from it — the post URLs, titles, captions and thumbnail URLs are overwritten to NULL in the database, not merely hidden. What remains is each item's identifiers (the platform name and the platform's post identifier, and your member public key), its publication date and category, and timestamps, which exist only so that other nodes replicating the deletion converge on it.
The node also keeps a cached copy of each post's preview image so the feed loads quickly. Deleting the channel removes those cached images from the node's memory and disk in the same operation — not on their next request, and not when the cache next fills up. That is true whichever way an item goes: deleting a single post, deleting your account, the automatic retention pruning below, or a moderator taking an item down.
Independently of anything you do, the node keeps only the 20 most recently published items from each channel. Older items beyond that are pruned automatically, with the same scrubbing applied. Items are not removed on age alone, so a channel that stops posting keeps its last 20 items until you delete them or the channel.
In the app: Settings → Account Deletion & Sign Out → Permanently Delete Account, and confirm by typing DELETE or your name. It deletes your account in the community you are using; your accounts in other communities stay. If that was the last community on the phone where you are a member, your identity keypair is erased from the phone too.
Any remaining balance is settled to your community's Commons Pool, since a mutual credit ledger has to stay in balance when a member leaves.
For the same reason, ledger entries recording trades between you and other members are retained in the community's transaction history. Those entries are what keep other members' balances correct, and erasing them would silently alter the record of trades other people made in good faith. They keep your public key and any note written on the trade, but no name, picture or contact.
Two conditions: the node will refuse to purge an account with a trade still in escrow or a cross-node settlement in flight, because doing so would strand the other party; complete or cancel those first. And the community's only owner must appoint another owner first.
If you linked a Google, Apple or Facebook sign-in in the phone app, BeanPool's key vault may keep a locked copy of your key, so that sign-in can bring your account back. When you delete your account at the last community on the phone, the app removes that copy first, signed by your key while the key is still on the phone. The vault deletes it at once, and from its backups within 30 days. The vault takes a removal signed by your key and nothing else, so once the key is gone, nobody could remove it.
If the vault does not confirm the removal (it can't be reached, for example), the app says so and keeps your key on the phone until you choose: Try Again, or Delete Anyway. If you delete anyway, the copy stays at the vault, locked to your sign-in: nobody can open it without that sign-in. To remove it later, get your key back with your 12 words or that sign-in, then, in a community that has you, open Settings → Account Protection and tap Disconnect. We can't remove it for you, even if you email us: the vault takes a removal only signed by your key.
Deleting at one community while another community on the phone still has you keeps your key, and the vault copy with it. The web app never puts a copy in the vault, and deleting in the web app does not remove one the phone app made: remove it in the phone app first (Settings → Account Protection → Disconnect).
Deleting data held by BeanPool is separate from revoking the authorisation you granted the platform. You can do that on the platform directly, and we recommend doing both:
If you no longer have access to your device or your identity keypair, you cannot authenticate to the node, and the in-app routes above will not be available to you. In that case, email [email protected] with the community node you joined and the callsign or platform username you used.
We can't remove a copy at BeanPool's key vault for you, even if you email us: the vault takes a removal only signed by your key. To remove it, get your key back with your 12 words or the sign-in you linked, then, in a community that has you, open Settings → Account Protection and tap Disconnect. We will action other verified requests within 30 days. Please note that each community node is operated independently; where a node is run by a local operator rather than by us, we will pass your request to that operator and confirm to you when it has been actioned.
Section 6 of our Privacy Policy sets out exactly what is stored when you connect a publishing account, and what is not.