Your Data, Your Exit: How Export and Account Deletion Work on Intently

Here is a feature article that is really an argument. Two things on Intently are fully built and almost never discussed: you can download everything you own as a single file, and you can delete your account in a way that actually deletes it. That second one deserves the emphasis, because on a great many platforms “delete” is a synonym for hidden — your row gets a flag, your profile stops appearing, and the data sits exactly where it always was, indefinitely, waiting for a policy change. We didn't build it that way. Deletion here is a hard cascade across twenty-five tables and then the user row itself, and this piece walks through precisely what that means, what the export file contains, and the one thing we deliberately keep.

The Export: One File, Everything You Own

The export is a single JSON file, generated on request, containing the data attached to your account. Not a summary or a report — the underlying records. It exists because data portability is a right worth honoring rather than a checkbox, and the endpoint says so out loud: its own internal documentation cites GDPR Articles 15 and 20, the right of access and the right to portability.

What lands in the file covers your core account record and the things hanging off it: your profile, your preferences, your stated intentions, your personality results, your photos (as records, with their URLs and ordering), your prompts, your likes, your matches, your conversations and the messages inside them, your subscription history, and your trust ratings. Quiz and daily-question responses come along too. If you have wondered what the platform actually holds about you, the honest answer is: open the file and look, because that is the file.

Why We Strip Those Fields

That last row is worth sitting with, because it looks like a contradiction: if this is your data, why hold anything back?

Because an export file is a portable object. It goes into your downloads folder, maybe into cloud storage, maybe into an email to yourself. A file containing your password hash and your live password-reset token is a file that can be used to take your account, and handing you one would be creating a security problem in the name of transparency. The excluded values are not facts about you — they are credentials and internal identifiers. Everything that describes you is in there; the keys to the building are not.

Deletion: What Actually Happens

Requesting deletion asks for your password. This is not friction for its own sake — it is the difference between an account you decided to delete and an account someone deleted while your laptop was unlocked. An open session is not proof of intent for an irreversible action, so we ask you to prove it is you, once.

After that, the sequence runs in order:

All of this happens while you wait. It is not queued for a nightly job or scheduled for a retention window — the cascade runs synchronously as part of the request. When the response comes back, the work is done.

The One Thing We Keep — and Why

There is exactly one deliberate exception, and it would be dishonest to write this article without it.

Reports work in two directions. Reports that you filed about other people are deleted with everything else — they are yours, and they go. But reports that other people filed about you are not deleted. They are kept, with the reference to you replaced by a sentinel value that means “this user has been deleted.”

The reasoning is straightforward once stated. If deletion erased reports made against an account, then deleting and re-registering would be a reliable way to launder a history of behavior — and the people who would use that route most enthusiastically are exactly the ones the reporting system exists to catch. So the report survives as a record of something that happened, while ceasing to point at a person. You are gone; the fact that someone once raised a concern is not attributed to you anymore, but it isn't pretended away either. We think that is the right trade, and we would rather tell you about it than let you discover the asterisk later.

Why Build It This Way

Retaining data after deletion is genuinely useful to a platform. It makes reactivation smooth, it keeps analytics tidy, and it means a departing user is only ever mostly gone. Deleting properly is strictly more work for strictly less institutional benefit.

We did it anyway because of what this particular platform is for. Intently asks people to write down what they actually want, answer questions about how they connect, and talk candidly with strangers. That is a lot to ask, and it is only reasonable to ask it if leaving is real. A platform that quietly keeps everything after you go is asking you to trust a promise; a platform that deletes in a cascade you can read about is offering you a mechanism. The mechanism is better.

It also sets an expectation you can hold us to. If you would like the broader picture of what is protected while you are here rather than when you leave, our overview of privacy and safety controls covers the day-to-day layer, and our guide to privacy settings every online dater should know is worth an hour on any platform, not just this one. If you are actively reducing what you leave behind across the internet, protecting your digital footprint is the practical companion piece.

How to Do Either One

Both live in your account settings. Export gives you the file directly — once per day, no request queue, no waiting for someone to approve it. Deletion asks for your password and then does what it says.

One suggestion worth making: if you are deleting, export first. The conversations in particular are the sort of thing people wish they had kept, and once the cascade has run there is nothing to recover from. It costs you thirty seconds and one download, and it is the only version of this that comes with an undo.