Categories and retention periods
1. Application data (rejected applicants)
Retention: 90 days from rejection, then
permanently deleted.
Why: short window to handle appeals or
re-applications. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR
(legitimate interest in abuse prevention and operational
continuity).
2. Application data (approved applicants)
Retention: for the lifetime of your Guild
account. Merged into your profile once approved.
Why: the application is the basis of your
membership. Deleted when you close your account.
3. Profile and account data
Retention: until you request deletion or
your account is closed for inactivity, then a 30-day
soft-deletion window, then permanent purge.
Why: required to operate the service.
Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (performance of the
membership contract).
4. Direct messages
Retention: 24 months from the date the
message was sent. Older messages are permanently deleted from
the server.
Why: active operational use; longer-term
retention is not necessary. Message bodies are end-to-end
encrypted in storage. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR.
5. Forum posts and replies
Retention: as long as the thread remains
useful to the community or until you request deletion of your
posts. We do not auto-delete forum content but we anonymise
it (replace the author with a tombstone) when the author's
account is deleted.
Why: community knowledge value. Legal basis:
Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (legitimate interest in maintaining a
useful archive).
6. Job posts and applications
Retention: 24 months from the date the post
expired or was filled.
Why: reasonable look-back for the operator
and applicant; longer is not necessary.
7. Authentication and security logs
Retention: sign-in events 90 days; failed
sign-in attempts and IP addresses 90 days.
Why: abuse and incident investigation.
Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR.
8. Push notification tokens
Retention: until you sign out or uninstall the app. Tokens are rotated by the operating system; expired tokens are pruned on the next delivery attempt.
9. Subscription and billing records
Retention: ten years from the end of the
calendar year in which the invoice was issued.
Why: mandatory under § 147 of the
German Fiscal Code (Abgabenordnung). Legal basis:
Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR (compliance with a legal obligation).
Even if you delete your Guild account, invoice records that
mention your name and address must be retained for tax
purposes; access to them is restricted to the finance
function.
10. Moderation and abuse reports
Retention: reports and the decisions taken
on them are retained for 24 months. Where the report led to
a permanent account termination for a serious or criminal
breach, the underlying record is retained for as long as the
ban remains in effect, plus 24 months.
Why: DSA accountability, evidence in case of
appeal, and prevention of repeat offences. Legal basis:
Art. 6(1)(c) and 6(1)(f) GDPR.
11. Support email correspondence
Retention: 36 months from the last reply,
then permanently deleted.
Why: resolving recurring issues and
documenting commitments made to members.
12. Anonymised analytics
Retention: raw events 12 months, anonymised
aggregates indefinitely.
Why: product improvement. We do not run
third-party analytics on the marketing site; in-app
telemetry, where used, is aggregated and stripped of
personal identifiers after 12 months.
What happens when you delete your account
- Your profile is immediately deactivated and removed from public listings.
- For 30 days the account is reversible by emailing hello@guild.guide — useful in case of mistake or compromised credentials.
- After 30 days the profile row, message bodies, forum-post author identity, push tokens, and other personal-data fields are permanently deleted.
- Forum posts are retained but reattributed to an anonymous tombstone author.
- Invoice and tax records continue to be retained for the periods set out above, under legal obligation.
Exceptions
Where data is subject to an active legal hold (litigation, regulatory investigation, or law-enforcement request), the retention periods above are extended until the hold is lifted. Where data has already been irreversibly anonymised it falls outside the scope of GDPR and is not subject to these periods.