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FAQ: Account Removal

If you want your account to be deleted, it must be done by writing a mail to support. If possible it will then be closed by a predefined process. Depending on the status of your account this may take some months.

Background: For the termination of an account the CAcert Community Agreement states:

3.3 Termination

The CAcert Community Agreement is terminated

 1. based on a Policy Group decision following (PoP => COD1). This terminates the Agreement with every member.
 2. with a ruling of the Arbitrator or the completion of a termination process defined by an Arbitrator ruling (DRP => COD7).
 3. by the end of existence of a member (i.e. death in the case of individuals).

A member may declare the wish to resign from CAcert at any time by writing to support AT cacert.org. This triggers a process for termination of this agreement with the member.

3.3a Consequences of Termination

The termination discontinues the right to USE, OFFER and CREATE personal certificates in any account of the former member. Those certificates will be revoked and all services to the former member will be terminated as soon as possible. However, some information will continue to be held for certificate processing purposes.

The provisions on Arbitration for the time of membership survive any termination. Former members are still bound by the DRP (COD7), and the Arbitrator may reinstate any provision of this agreement or bind them to a ruling.

As far as Organisations are concerned details are also defined in the Organisation Assurance Policy (OAP => COD11).

Every member learning about the death of a member or termination of existence of a member should notify support AT cacert.org.

The actual process for deleting your account was defined at latest in the ruling of the following arbitration case: a20141024.1

How. You have to send an email to SUPPORT <support AT cacert SPAMFREE DOT org>. Please use the subject "Account Removal". This will initiate the required process.

Discussion

Why. Although you may choose to resign at any time, this does not close off your future risks, liabilities and obligations, nor those of other people. This is because when you use certificates, you create the potential for other people to rely on you, and they may (quite fairly) continue to rely on you even after resigning.

If you lost your password or otherwise lost control over your account, you do not need to terminate your account. It is often much easier to recover an account, than to terminate an account. Support will help you in this case.

Which. The following information will be needed/helpful to terminate your account:

the main email address of your account, as the primary identifier
if you have assured other people you may be asked to hand over your CAP forms to another Assurer (or better Arbitrator), if you have no issue to do so, it would speed things up to include this in your email. If all your assurances are older than 7 years, it would be enough to state rightfully, that you have savely destroyed them.
if you are an assurer and you think you will not be able to hand over your CAP forms, it would help to include, that you will keep them savely and destroy them when they are older than 7 years.

It may also speed things up if certificates are terminated (revoked/expired).

Terms. In this context, removing/deleting your account, resigning, and terminating your agreement with the Community (CCA) all mean approximately the same thing.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact support to ask them.

Future Feature Change

It would be useful to have a single button to file a request for resignation (dispute). After pressing this button, the dispute should be filed, and a screen should describe some text like the above that describes why the request is in process.

There is already a "dispute" button in the system. This could have "general dispute" and "resignation" added as buttons, if convenient for software reasons.

A proposal of the support-arbitration communication tool

CategoryFAQ