It can be frustrating trying to figure out how to remove your email address from Square, especially if you never gave it to them in the first place, and you are trying to invoke a ‘right to be forgotten’. It’s daunting enough trying to figure out how to change your Square email address, but figuring out how to remove it and other personal data from Square is nearly impossible. We say “nearly” because we have ferreted out how to remove your email address from Square, and we’re going to tell you how.
First, to be clear, if you are in the U.S., you don’t have a legal right to be forgotten. But you can try to have Square remove all personally identifiable information and try to have them purge all your personal data from their system.
Second, the reason that Square has your email address at all is because at some point you gave your email address to a merchant who used Square to run your credit card, and so your email address was transmitted to Square along with your credit card info, and became associated with your credit card. So now every time that you use that credit card to purchase a product or service from a business that uses Square, Square emails the receipt to that email address which is associated with that card. If you’d like to read more about this, see our article How the Heck did Square get My Email Address?
Third, we have written before about how to remove an email address in terms of disassociating your email address from your credit card, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Square is removing your email address completely from their system. In fact, in that previous article about how to remove your email address from being used for receipts, we specifically said that “we have no idea whether Square actually completely removes your email address from their system, or whether they just decouple it from your credit card.” That was back in 2017, and now, in 2021, we do know: if you are looking to invoke a ‘right to be forgotten’ sort of data cleanse – i.e. to have Square purge your email address and other personal data entirely from the Square universe, well, that method isn’t going to do it. In between 2017 and 2021, in 2019, Vice also wrote about the issue, excoriating Square for inobvious systems. In that 2019 Vice piece a Square spokesperson was quoted as saying “We are evaluating ways to make our tools even easier to use for both the buyer and seller.” A) “even” easier? B) They haven’t.
So, here is what we have learned since about how to have your data removed from Square. First, let us tell you just how freaking of a convoluted field of rabbit holes we had to go through in order to find this information for you. Back in 2017 when we first wrote about Square, it was nigh on impossible to find the information about how to change, decouple, or remove your email address. Guess what? It still is. You would not believe the contortions we had to go through to get this information for you. Ultimately, our CEO, who is an attorney, had to write to Square’s legal office to get the information.
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How to Change, Unsubscribe or Remove Your Email Address from Square in 2021
Here’s the bottom line: If you want to remove your email address from Square because you want to change the email address associated with your credit card, click on the links at the bottom of any Square receipt. But if you want Square to remove your email address or data, you have to take that up with the Square privacy office. This is what our CEO was told by the Square legal office. So, email the Square privacy office at privacy@squareup.com. Yep, we made it easy to find, because they didn’t.
Of course, even if they remove all of your personal information, the next time you use a credit or debit card with a business that uses Square you will have to give it to them all over again, especially if you want a receipt – otherwise you will be well and truly sqrewed.
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