Perhaps you have found yourself in the situation that for whatever reason you have changed your phone number or lost / abandoned it, in those situations what the operator does is release that number and hand it over to another person, a person who will be surprised when installing the famous WhatsApp instant messaging application if the previous one forgot to delete his account (having access to the previous user's account).
WhatsApp accounts are linked to a phone number, neither to a person, nor to an email or to a physical device, this brings a huge comfort benefit by confirming with an SMS the activation of the account and forgetting about registrations and passwords and so on, but it also means a potential privacy risk since anyone who has that phone number can get all the data linked to it.
To prevent a person from acquiring your WhatsApp when they get your phone number, today we are going to show you how disable and remove completely Your WhatsApp account in a few simple steps.
What does it mean to delete your WhatsApp account?
- The link between your phone number and your personal WhatsApp data (profile picture, status, chats, multimedia files …) will be removed.
- Your registered payment method will be deleted from WhatsApp servers.
- Copies of your chats hosted on both your iOS device and iCloud will be deleted.
- The number will be free for a new WhatsApp registration.
Precautions
It is recommended make a backup of your iOS device locally on your PC or MAC, deleting your WhatsApp account will also delete the automatic backup of the chats in iCloud and if we ever want to reactivate our account and keep our files we will have to apply that manual backup.
Steps to follow
Step 1:
We locate the WhatsApp app installed on our iOS device and open it (applicable on Android).
Step 2:
We go to the Settings section within the application and enter the "Account" section.
Step 3:
In the "Account" section, click on the "Delete my account" option.
Step 4:
Enter our phone number to confirm the deletion and once finished we delete the application from our device (to effectively erase all data that is stored locally).
With these simple steps our account will have been deleted satisfactorily and the next person who acquires your current phone number can register as a new WhatsApp user, without retaining any conversation, photo or personal data of its previous owner.
This situation is applicable to oneself., that is, if at any time we want to reactivate our account we will do it as if we were new users, we must register with our phone number and activate the account via SMS to start again or recover all the data from the previous backup.
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