FAQ: Account Removal
see also: FAQ: How To Terminate CAcert Membership
If you want your account to be deleted, it must be done by means of filing a dispute. This is because the CAcert Community Agreement states that:
3.3 Termination You may terminate this agreement by resigning from CAcert. You may do this at any time by writing to CAcert's online support forum and filing dispute to resign. All services will be terminated, and your certificates will be revoked. However, some information will continue to be held for certificate processing purposes. The provisions on Arbitration survive any termination by you by leaving CAcert. That is, even if you resign from CAcert, you are still bound by the DRP (COD7), and the Arbitrator may reinstate any provision of this agreement or bind you to a ruling. Only the Arbitrator may terminate this agreement with you.
How. You may file a dispute by sending email to support[at]"our domain" (cacert.org). Please use the subject "Account Removal" and the support people will manage the dispute from that point on: An Arbitrator will process the request and authorise the deletion.
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.
Which. In order to understand this, we refer the whole issue to Arbitration. This is primarily so that a human can examine the issue, advise and rule; it does not mean that you will not be able to resign. The Arbitrator will be interested in investigating the following:
- the main email address of your account, as the primary identifier,
- the circumstances for termination of agreement,
- the extent of any certificates issued, used and relied upon, and
- that it is really you that is resigning.
This is so that the Arbitrator can assess the extent of risks, liabilities and obligations, and make sure appropriate steps are taken. This will be relatively simple if you never used your certificates, harder if you are a heavy cert user.
Authentication. If you use email, then you may need to authenticate yourself as directed by the Arbitrator. For example, support people might ask you about your Lost-Passphrase Questions, or ask you to log into your account and do something to show you have control. These steps will be necessary to make sure that nobody else could request your account to be removed.
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 the email support.
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.
This is old info and is not up to date, it clashes with DRP: Basically that feature in the website need to be changed / dropped to cope with DRP old, deprecated, wrong
If you want a secondary account to be deleted:
Please login to the account you want to keep, go the Dispute in the menu, Dispute email, and there enter the email address of the secondary account you want deleted. When the dispute is acknowledged, the account gets automatically deleted.