With the recent changes to WhatsApp’s terms of service, many users are leaving WhatsApp for other messaging apps. However, as long as your account exists, Facebook still holds onto your data. In this article, we’ll go through how to delete your WhatsApp account and keep your personal information safe.

Key Takeaways:

• You’ll need to delete your WhatsApp account to keep your data private.
• You can delete your account on both iOS and Android.
• Your messages will only be recoverable with a local backup.
• You’ll lose your Google Drive or iCloud backup when WhatsApp deletes your account.

How to Delete Your WhatsApp Account Permanently 

Before you delete your WhatsApp account, you should create a new local backup because WhatsApp will delete your iCloud or Google Drive backup with your account. You can do this by following our guide on how to backup WhatsApp and copying the WhatsApp folder with the msgstore.db.crypt file to a safe place.

Although we used an Android smartphone, you can pretty much follow the same steps on iOS, just skip step one. Go to “settings” and click on “account,” then click on “delete my account” and finally, enter your phone number.

After deleting your account, WhatsApp will remove all of your message history, groups, contacts and personal information attached to it. Although anything that is already on your phone will stay there, and Facebook might keep some of the data it already has, WhatsApp can’t collect any new information, as the account no longer exists.

What Happens When You Delete Your WhatsApp Account? 

When you delete your account, a few things will happen. Most of these are permanent, as WhatsApp will remove everything from its servers. However, you can get your messages back if you have a local backup of the data.

• It will start to remove your account from WhatsApp’s servers.
• It will erase your message history.
• It will remove you from any WhatsApp groups.
• It will delete any backups on Google Drive or iCloud.

Final Thoughts

Deleting your WhatsApp account isn’t difficult, and although it may take Facebook up to 90 days to delete your data, doing so will prevent them from taking any more. It might also encourage your friends and family to move to a more private messaging app, although you should check that they do a chat backup in case they want to access their old messages at a later date.

However, just moving to a new messaging service with a better privacy policy isn’t the only way to stay private online. There are many other privacy tools, like secure VPNs and encrypted cloud storage services, that can help you keep your data out of anyone else’s hands. A VPN also comes in handy when you travel to countries where WhatsApp is banned.

We have a guide on how to get around the WhatsApp ban in Dubai and other restrictive countries. We also have a guide on how to delete Facebook or you can simply change your Facebook privacy settings instead.

Is WhatsApp your main online messaging service? Are you planning on deleting your account? Have you tried other messaging apps? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below. Thanks for reading.