It turns out that Joplin Cloud account cannot be cancelled. The interface only allows for cancelling a paid subscription, but it provides no means to delete the account completely. Writing to support@joplincloud.com doesn’t work, too: people there only answer something like “follow the instructions on [I even cannot cite their link here]” which is totally useless.
I regret that I once entrusted my bank card number to Joplin Cloud and I’ve already blocked that card in order not to be billed anymore.
Not sure why you bring that up on a public forum. First that's a lie, since it's very easy to cancel an account - just click on Manage Subscription and click Cancel. That's it, no call to make, no support ticket to open.
When you emailed me I've replied this:
Please follow the instructions on Joplin Cloud - Help to cancel your account. The data will then be automatically deleted.
The process to fully delete an account recently landed into production and I've been trying it over the past few days. When I'm confident it's safe, I will enable automation so that cancelled accounts get automatically deleted after a certain time.
And I have to repeat for the third time, this only allows for cancelling a paid subscription plan and not for deleting the account. Do you see the difference?
hey, sorry to see you go, I understand you'd like to be certain that your data will be deleted. Thanks for making this clear.
Currently, the feature of account deletion is in beta state, so for this short while we have to wait a little before completely erasing it. I get that it is inconvenient leaving your personal data in uncertain state and I'm sorry that it's necessary to put you in this situation. Although, I'd like to assure you that it will be most certainly deleted once the feature is ready to be deployed.
If there's anything else I can help you with, let me know.
Let me see if I can clarify the issues here. You are seeing a difference between an account and a subscription. You are also concerned that a relatively unknown company has your credit card information. I am guessing that you are thinking that when you cancelled your subscription, the account with credit card information remained and you had to trust Joplin not to mess with it.
As I understand it, the Joplin people, didn't want to have credit cards or mess with that at all, so when you create an "account" it is really setup with Stripe, who records your credit card information. Joplin never sees it. I also take payments over the Internet and don't mess with cards, so hired Square to process my payments and never see any credit card information. The payment area says "powered by Stripe"
But, interesting question. What does Stripe do with an account including credit card information when an account is cancelled? I'd like to know too, since I do the same thing with Square and have absolutely no idea.
Or did I miss the issue entirely? Let's assume everyone here is operating in good faith.
The credit card info at processors is usually retained for legal reasons for a certain amount of time.
A company (or an individual) that uses Stripe as a processor never sees the full credit card number, but only the last 4 numbers.
The data that is retained at the processor for legal reasons is not accessible by anyone but Stripe.
Here is the flow:
I pay with a credit card using Stripe at company A. In company A's Stripe account,
a customer record (a) for me is created
a credit card record (b) is created (please note that company A does not see the full info)
a transaction record (c) for the credit card charge is created
As Tessus said, it's only possible to see the last 4 digits and once a subscription is cancelled (as OP did) it's of course not possible to charge anything.
It's possible to delete an account with the Stripe API, which I'll do, however they may indeed keep it on their side for longer for legal reasons.
Edit: I have updated the post title since it was misleading.
This is something out of our control. It's the same when you cancel your credit card and the credit card company still keeps your transactions for 7 years.
But as mentioned in my previous post, this info (if they really keep any data) is not accessible by anyone but Stripe.