Effective date: August 21, 2026.
Account closure
An account-closure request starts a seven-day cooling-off period measured from the request, not from the user's last sign-in. The user may withdraw the request during that period. Afterward an authorized administrator reviews the request. The system does not automatically erase an active membership, event registration, order, refund, moderation record, governance record or record CYWater must retain.
Closure, cancellation and deletion are different
Signing out ends a browser session. Cancelling a membership ends future renewal but does not refund the current membership term, and preserves the account and transaction history. An event refund or membership billing correction follows the Billing, Cancellation and Refund Policy. Account closure removes or anonymizes eligible profile and account data only after review; it does not reverse a transaction or destroy another person's or the association's required records.
Proposed retention schedule
- Account and public profile: remove or anonymize after approved closure when no overriding operational or legal need remains.
- Payments, orders, refunds and accounting evidence: seven years after the relevant transaction or fiscal year, subject to accountant and legal confirmation.
- Membership history and governance decisions: retain the minimum record needed to document eligibility, benefits, votes and association actions; remove unnecessary profile detail when no longer needed.
- Event registrations: three years after the event unless a longer accounting, safety, grant, dispute or legal need applies.
- Forum and moderation records: retain published content while it remains useful to the community; retain restricted moderation and abuse evidence only as long as reasonably needed for safety, appeals or legal claims.
- Partnership and MOU records: seven years after the relationship ends, subject to the signed agreement and accounting requirements.
- Logo Call: delete non-selected files twelve months after final results unless a dispute or legal hold applies; retain selected work, approvals and signed rights records while CYWater uses or protects the design.
- Security and delivery logs: normally up to twelve months unless needed to investigate abuse, fraud or delivery failures.
- Backups: expire under the hosting backup rotation and are not edited solely to remove one live record. Deleted live data may remain in protected backups until that rotation expires.
Deletion safeguards
CYWater verifies the requester, scopes deletion to that person, checks for active services and retention obligations, and records the decision without keeping unnecessary personal detail. Deletion must not damage another person's records. Where deletion is not permitted, access should be restricted and the retained data minimized. A legal hold, active dispute, suspected fraud or security investigation pauses deletion of relevant records.