As an organizer, you’ve made a special commitment and contribution to the Meetup community. If you wish to permanently close your Meetup account and delete your personal information, we want to help you navigate that process and make you aware of your options regarding your groups.

You can submit a request to delete your account in the following ways:

• Contact us with your request by sending an email to privacy@meetup.com.
• Fill out the form available in this Help Center article: "Request permanent deletion of your data." You must be logged in to your Meetup account to view this article and access the form.
• Click on the “Delete account and personal information” link in your profile settings on the Meetup app. Note that this link should only be used to request permanent deletion of your Meetup account. If you have a different request (such as a request to close a group) or issue to discuss with Meetup, please submit a request to our Community Support team.

If you request to delete your account:

• Once your request is processed, your account will be permanently closed and cannot be reinstated.
• Once your request is processed, you will also be permanently removed as the organizer of your groups.
• You have two options regarding your groups:  (1) You can leave your groups open, which will allow your community to continue thriving under a different organizer; or (2) You can ask us to close your groups. Please let us know which option you choose when you submit your deletion request or follow these steps before submitting your deletion request. If you don’t specify, we will reach out to ask for your instructions.
• We will wait a few days to process your request.  Your request will be withdrawn if you create an event or RSVP to an event within 7 days of submitting your deletion request.
• You will need to follow a separate process to cancel your organizer subscription.  This article explains how to cancel your subscription.

For information on how to submit a deletion request to Meetup, additional rights you may have regarding your data, and how Meetup uses your data, please review Meetup’s Privacy Policy.

To protect your online event from unwanted guests and disruptions, you can take steps to ensure your meeting remains secure. As a reminder, Meetup is unable to moderate behavior that occurs offsite, such as on Zoom.

Set a meeting password

A unique password automatically generated by Zoom will prevent uninvited users from being able to join your event, even if they have the meeting link. Be careful where you share your meeting code. If possible, wait to send the code until shortly before the event begins. Learn how to set a Zoom meeting password.

Set screen sharing to "host only"

When screen sharing privileges are set to "all," any member who joins a meeting could project disruptive imagery to the event's participants. Learn how to set screen sharing privileges for your event.

Disable "allow removed participants to rejoin"

If you remove unwanted attendees from your event, you can make sure they cannot rejoin. Learn how to disable "allowing removed participants to rejoin".

Control audio settings to manage background noise

As the host of a meeting, you can control the audio permissions for attendees. This can manage background noise and distractions. Learn how to manage audio controls for your event.

Adjust your group's content visibility

Meetup organizers can manage the security of their group and events. If you make your group private, potential new members will still be able to see upcoming events listed in their search results -- but specific details about accessing the event will be restricted until their membership is approved. Learn more about managing your group's content visibility settings and controlling who joins your group.

Organizers have the option to ask members questions when they request to join a group or respond to an event.

Organizers and members should not ask for or provide sensitive or private personal information in profile and event questions and answers.

What are profile and event questions?

Profile questions are a set of questions that members are prompted to answer when they join or request to join a group.

Event questions are questions that members are prompted to answer when they respond to an event.

What is sensitive or private personal information?

Sensitive or private personal information includes but is not limited to:

• Full name
• Address or email address
• Phone number
• Social Security number
• Financial information
• Race or ethnic origin
• Political opinions
• Religious or philosophical beliefs
• Trade union membership
• Health data
• Sexual orientation

Who can see members’ responses to profile and event questions?

Profile questions

Responses to profile questions are visible to different groups of people depending on the group’s content visibility settings.

Organizers can set their group content visibility settings to public or private. Public and private groups share information in different ways.

Public groups

Responses to profile questions for public groups are visible to the public. This includes the Meetup community and search engines.

Private groups

Responses to profile questions for private groups are visible to all members of the group, including its leadership team and the network administrator if it’s a Meetup Pro group.

Event questions

Responses to event questions are visible to the group’s leadership team, the event host, and the network administrator if it’s a Meetup Pro group. All responses to event questions are optional.

Related policies and terms for using Meetup

To learn more about user privacy, guidelines, and what’s acceptable on Meetup, view our Privacy policy, Terms of service, and Usage and content policies.

You may have heard of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Union data protection law that went into effect on May 25, 2018. Its purpose is to harmonize data protection laws across the EU, give people in the EU enhanced rights to their data, and require businesses to meet certain technical and organizational controls around their collection and processing of personal information.

Meetup has made changes in line with these new standards that we will roll out to members globally.

Meetup's commitment to privacy and data security

Meetup remains committed to protecting our members’ privacy and data security. As part of that commitment, we’ve updated our Privacy Policy effective May 25, 2018, for all members globally. These changes provide:

• Details on how we use your information, such as your location and other platform activity, and the choices and controls available to you.
  
  
• Responsibilities for businesses that process personal information, such as asking consent for marketing communications.
  
  
• Opportunities to request more information about the data we store, or to modify it.

One of the important ways that Meetup respects our members’ privacy is by offering options for whether a group is Public or Private. In a Private group, some information is hidden from search engines and other members. In response to the GDPR, we’re adding a clear privacy label to group information, and making sure members are informed if a group that they belong to changes its privacy status.

We’re taking other steps to be more transparent. For example, we have updated our privacy policy to detail how and why we collect some data, and we will be implementing additional platform notices and articles to remind our members of this.

Meetup groups can have two content visibility settings: public or private. These settings determine how much of a group’s content and membership information is visible to non-members and search engines. Learn more about Meetup content and search engines.

Information that is always visible for public and private groups:

• Group title and description
• Event titles, dates, times, and the number of members attending
• Username and photo of the organizer
• Group's cover photo
• Number of members in the group
• Topics associated with the group
• Group reviews
• Names of the group organizers (including co-organizers and assistant organizers on the Leadership Team)

Private groups

The following information is hidden from non-members and search engines:

• The usernames and profile information of the group’s members, including answers to profile questions requested by the organizer
• The location for past and upcoming events 
• The event descriptions for past and present events
• The group’s photo albums
• The group’s Discussions section

Anyone can join a private group, unless the organizer sets up member approval measures.

Changing a group’s content visibility

Making a group private is a permanent change. Once a group is changed to private, it cannot be made public again. Learn how to edit your group's content visibility. 

When an organizer changes the content visibility settings of their group, group members will be alerted via email notification. If a member does not feel comfortable sharing the information that is visible for public groups, they have the option to leave the group.

Hiding other visible content

You can choose to hide your group membership and hide your interests from your profile pages. However, in public groups, membership and profile information of members is still visible to non-members and search engines. Learn more about your account privacy settings.

Search engines crawl and record billions of public web pages, including Meetup.com.

If you list your full name or other information about you in your Meetup profile or on any public page on the Meetup site, search engines can see it.

If you find search engine results pointing to personal information on Meetup that you don't want to be publicly visible, edit the information on the Meetup site.

To edit your personal information, visit your Account page.

Once you've edited or removed your information, it will no longer appear on the Meetup site. 

However, this information may still appear in search results as cached versions of Meetup pages. Search engines will update their memory of these pages the next time they crawl the Meetup site. When that happens, the search engine will replace their old copy of the page with personal info on it with the latest version which does not contain personal info.

We can't control exactly when Google or any other search engine will update their results, but it's usually within 30 days.

If you'd like more information about removing content from Google's search index, check here.

If you would like a photograph of yourself removed from the Meetup site, your best option is to contact the person who posted the pictures. If this does not resolve the situation, you should contact the group's organizer.

To contact an organizer:

Via Desktop & Mobile Web

1. Navigate to the Meetup group's page.
2. Scroll down to the Members section.
3. Select Message next to the organizer’s name.

Android app

1. Navigate to the Meetup group's page.
2. Tap on the V Arrow icon to reveal the group's description and organizer.
3. Tap the Message icon to contact the organizer.

iOS app

1. Navigate to the Meetup group's page.
2. Tap About us to reveal the group's description.
3. Tap Message icon to contact the organizer.