Account Deletion

Reasons to delete an account

An account is deleted if one of the following conditions occur:

  • The account owner requests deletion: A user may request the deletion of her/his account by contacting edu-ID support. To avoid abuse, the user has to confirm a deletion request that has been sent to the email addresses stored in the account.
  • Account was merged into another account: To resolve duplicates, edu-ID accounts may be merged. While one account is retained, the other is deleted.
  • Owner has deceased: An account is deleted if there is sufficient evidence of the death of its owner.
  • Violation of terms of use: An account may be deleted without further notice if the terms of use were violated.
  • 10 years of account inactivity: An account is deleted if it wasn't used for 10 years to access a service.

Note: an account can't be deleted as long as current affiliations (active or deactivated) are associated with it. Refer to Affiliation Removal for further information.

Account deletion process

Account deletion is implemented by deactivating it, and stripping off all personal data. The following data is retained for an unlimited time:

Retained for auditability reasons

  • references to accounts that were merged with the deleted account
  • account creation date
  • comments that were manually added by edu-ID staff
  • Meta-information: Attribute quality information with validation timestamps, IP-address with which the account was last used, unused one-time-tokens

Retained to avoid re-use by another account

  • edu-ID internal Identifier (swissEduID)
  • AAI Unique ID (swissEduPersonUniqueID)