Chances are that you’ve used the Telegram instant messenger app. I reported on its benefits in a previous article, and there’s a lot speaking for the service. If you for whatever reason decide that you don’t want or need your account anymore, you’ve come to the right place. Maybe you want to use a different messaging service (like TeleGuard for example). Maybe you’re on a digital detox diet. There are many reasons for deleting one’s old accounts. In this article, I will guide you through how to delete your Telegram account. This article will focus the Telegram iOS app but applies to the service in general.
What Data does your Telegram Account Contain
At a glance, your instant messaging accounts shouldn’t contain much data about you. After all, you signed up for an end-to-end encrypted service. Naively, we would assume that this covers all data we share with the service. We couldn’t be wrong more.
To operate, Telegram (and other services) requires and keeps a surprisingly large minimum of knowledge about you and your chatting habits. This includes:
The Obvious Ones
- Your credentials. Telegram (similar to WhatsApp) uses your phone number and a shared secret to authenticate your mobile apps with the service. While the shared secret is automatically negotiated and doesn’t represent personal information, your phone number does. Many countries (including the entirety of the EU) require phone numbers to be tied to a real person. The relevant legislations include the ePricavy Directive (2002/58/EC), the Anti Money Laundering Directive, and various national legislations’ requirements. This largely is the reason why you can’t sign up for many services without providing your phone number.
- Your contacts. Telegram (again, like many others) wants you to be deeply emotionally invested into their service so you stick around longer. This includes driving you into sharing your entire contact list. Telegram claims that they use this information only to suggest friends to chat with that you already know; the flip-side of this is that all of your contacts already on Telegram are automatically notified once you join the service. Your contact list is retained on their servers (and that includes at least the phone numbers and names you gave them on your phone).
- Your (encrypted) messages. While your messages are end-to-end encrypted (let’s trust Telegram on that), their metadata is not. This includes the message size, time sent, time received, whom the message was sent to, in what frequency you message that contact, etc. Even if you’re cautious about your origin IP (for example by using a VPN), this information can somewhat correlate you to your country of origin and other details using statistical analysis.
The Not So Obvious Ones
- Your IP address. To comply with the EU’s Data Retention Directive (2006/24/EC) and various local laws, services operating in many parts of the world need to store your connection information for at least some duration. Services forward this information to law enforcement should your account be involved in a criminal investigation.
- Your device identification. Telegram stores characteristics of your phone (unique identifiers to fingerprint it). You’ve sure seen dialogs like “We noticed a login from a new device, please verify now“. If you’re wondering how they know, this is it.
- You location. I presented features of the Telegram app in this article. One of the features includes finding new people and groups nearby. This can be a nice treat, but it also requires you to constantly provide Telegram’s servers with your precise GPS location. If you use the functionality, this data is retained for an unknown amount of time and cannot be encrypted for the location-based search to work.
From the data above, the only element that is really end-to-end encrypted is the actual content (and maybe the type) of the messages you send. Everything else is readily available and readable to Telegram’s server software. There may be more data stored in your account, but the above is the bare minimum that we can trust is stored about you.
Why Delete your Old Account Data
Telegram’s Terms of Service (TOS) make it pretty clear that they don’t intend to act maliciously on your data. It’s not in their interest either, as they want to keep as many users on the platform as possible. While you could leave your data on their servers and forget about it, there are reasons to get rid of it still. I’m listing some of the most prominent ones below:
- Cleaning out Accounts: You’re focusing your instant messaging efforts on a narrower set of apps. You don’t want your contacts to still see your Telegram account and assume they can reach you there. Deleting that account sends a clear signal of “I moved to a different service, you won’t reach me here“.
- Getting rid of Stalkers: Assuming you didn’t give out your phone number (but use a username), you want to disconnect stalkers and strangers. Deleting an old account and creating a new one gives you a clean slate and the opportunity to choose a new, pristine, untainted username.
- Avoiding Private Data Leaks: Leaks of personal information happen on a regular, expensive basis. There’s a pretty good chance your email address is in one of them already. You can use Have I Been Pwned to find out if that’s the case. Deleting your old account data reduces your risk of unwillingly (and unknowingly) giving away stale private data on services’ servers.
All of the above are legit reasons. There are likely more individual ones, but for many people the above already justify deleting their Telegram account if they don’t intend to use it anymore.
Pausing vs. Deleting your Account
Many services allow you to pause your account instead of deleting it right away. They usually give you options to hide your account or gift you temporary perks if you stay. While this is nice, it doesn’t nullify the reasons from above. Hiding your account (like many dating apps allow you to) solves an entirely different issue – hiding your account’s presence from others. Your data on the servers stays the same, so don’t be tricked into thinking this changes anything.
You should pause your account if you feel overwhelmed with managing it, if you want to give another messenger a try without ditching your current one altogether, or if you need a pause from instant messaging. In all other cases (except probably rare exceptions) you should consider deleting it if you’re already thinking about it. If you can’t come up with a good reason to keep it, delete it.
What happens when you Delete your Telegram Account
Deleting your data from a service’s servers can mean very different things. In the case of TeleGuard, only one unique ID remains. In the case of Telegram, it’s not necessarily known. What’s definitely sure is that in the EU, the GDPR Article 17 “Right to be Forgotten“ ensures that your data isn’t kept forever.
Some of your data will be retained for some duration so Telegram can serve any law enforcement requests they receive. This may include your device identifiers, IPs, contact list, message metadata, etc. Ultimately, they need to delete it though. They’re also interested in doing so, as old account data sums up in terms of storage space (and latent costs) over time.
After you deleted your Telegram account successfully, it will disappear from your peers’ contact lists. They won’t be able to message you anymore, although client apps may retain old conversations (and show you as “Deleted User“). This solely depends on how the many different Telegram clients handle this situation. This in turn means that other users may still have data about you, including the unencrypted version of messages you exchanged with them. If you have something personal to hide, make sure you don’t share it in the first place.
Deleting Now vs. Deleting Later
You now have a clear picture of what deleting your account means and where it leaves you. Let’s have a look at how to delete your account from inside the iOS Telegram app. When you’re inside the app, open the “Settings” panel and select the “Privacy and Security” section. Inside that section, you see various privacy related settings and a rather misleading “If Away For” item:
This item looks like it allows you to only delete your account after some time of inactivity. This is a nifty trick to hide the account delection functionality. Telegram is legally obliged to allow you to immediately delete your account if desired. This is part of the GDPR “Right to be Forgotten” requirements when companies want to operate inside the EU. The situation may be different if you’re outside the EU. Some time ago, when legislation in that regard wasn’t as clear as it is today, deletion after inactivity was the only way to get rid of your account.
Your Options for Account Deletion
If you select that item, it opens a menu that let’s you select after which period of inactivity you want your account deleted automatically. You can choose from 1 month to 1 year. Mind though that if you log in during that period, the deletion request gets canceled. At the end of that list, you get the option to “Delete Account Now” which does exactly what it says. You’re asked for confirmation one more time, and then the account is gone, alongside all data.
Once you deleted the account, you are free to register a new one. If you register and delete accounts too quickly with the same phone number though, you have to wait for a couple of days until you can use it again for registration. After this step, your Telegram account is gone and your previous contacts won’t see you as a Telegram user anymore.
Conclusion
Deleting one’s old online accounts is never a bad idea. Data legitimately required to run a service often contains very personal and identifying details about yourself. If you’re at least a little privacy minded, you’re looking out for your data. It’s all too easy these days to be contained in a data leak. Ensure to delete your old accounts; not only Telegram, but others (like deleting your TeleGuard account) if you don’t need them anymore. In this article, you learned about the whys and hows of How to Delete your Telegram Account.
If you want to share your own experiences and insights, comment below to get the conversation started!