What happens to your shared data if you break up

A long relationship produces a large, tangled, jointly owned pile of data, and nobody thinks about it until the week it becomes a problem.

Photos in two clouds and one shared album. A streaming account with four profiles. A shared calendar. A family plan on a phone contract. Messages spanning nine years. A password manager with shared vaults. A smart doorbell one of you can still see.

The ownership problem is genuinely unresolved

A conversation between two people belongs to both of them in any ordinary sense, and to neither of them exclusively.

Most services handle this by giving each account holder control over their own copy and no control over the other's. That is the only workable rule and it means you cannot make your ex delete their copy of anything, whatever the law says about your own data.

Photographs are worse, because a photograph of you taken by them is their file, containing your image, and reasonable people disagree about what that implies.

You can delete your copy. You cannot delete theirs, and no service and no regulation will do it for you.

What to do in the first fortnight

Change passwords on everything personal, including the accounts you assume they never used. Start with email, because email is the reset mechanism for everything else.

Check for devices still signed in. Most major services have an active sessions page and most people have never opened it. Televisions and games consoles are the usual surprise.

Turn off location sharing, in both directions, and check the family sharing settings on both platforms, which persist independently of anything else.

Look at anything with a camera or a lock in it. Doorbells, cameras, smart locks. Access here is frequently retained long after everything else is sorted, and it is the category with the most potential for harm.

Separate the phone plan if it is shared, which is usually slower than everything else and should be started early.

The shared archive

Shared photo albums are the most emotionally difficult and the least urgent. Nobody has to decide in the first month.

The pragmatic approach is to take a copy of anything you want before anyone starts deleting, and then leave it alone for a while. Decisions made in the first weeks about nine years of photographs are frequently regretted.

For children's photographs, some form of copy for both parents is worth agreeing explicitly, because it is one of the more common sources of later conflict and one of the easiest to resolve early.

The quiet ones

Password manager shared vaults. Recovery contacts on Apple and Google accounts, which people set years ago and never revisit. Emergency contacts on medical records. Beneficiaries on accounts and policies, which is not a data question but belongs on the same list. Two-factor recovery codes printed out and kept in a drawer in a house you no longer live in.

Where an app like ours fits

In Duoheart a couple's content is encrypted on the devices, which means we do not hold a readable archive that could be handed to either of you or exposed later.

Unpairing ends the shared connection. Deleting your account removes what we hold. What is on your former partner's device remains on your former partner's device, and that is a limit rather than a policy: we cannot reach into it, and neither can anyone else.

We would rather say that clearly than let anyone assume we can delete something for them that we cannot.

The advice nobody takes

Keep the operational and the personal separate while things are good. Shared household accounts in one place, personal accounts in another, with no reused passwords between them.

It takes an evening, it is unromantic, and it converts what is otherwise a grim fortnight into a short afternoon.