Delete or revoke a shared chat
Last updated 18 September 2026
A link you shared last week can be switched off today. This page covers how to do it, where your ability to do it actually lives, and what to do if you have since changed browser or the conversation was shared by someone else.
Save the master link when you share
Preserve has no accounts and no sign-in, so there is no password protecting your shared chats and no email address tying them to you. Control over a link lives in two places instead.
The first is this browser. The app remembers the chats you have shared here, so you can come back and manage them. That memory is stored by the browser itself, which means clearing your browsing data, using private browsing, or moving to a different browser or device will empty the list.
The second is the master link, which you are given when you create a shared chat. It is the portable copy of that control: it works from any browser, on any device, and it keeps working after you have cleared everything. Save it somewhere you will still have in six months, at the moment you create the share rather than later.
Treat the master link as a key rather than a bookmark. Anyone holding it can manage and delete that shared chat, so keep it to yourself and do not send it to the people you are sharing the conversation with. The public link is the one they get.
Revoke a link you created
The link stops working immediately, for everyone, including people who already have it. The stored messages are removed from the live service. There is no waiting period and no expiry to wait out.
- Open your master link, or return to app.preserve.chat in the same browser you shared from.
- Find the shared chat you want to remove.
- Choose delete, and confirm.
- Open the public link yourself to check that it no longer loads.
What deleting does and does not reach
Deleting removes the shared copy from the service and breaks the URL. Copies can remain briefly in routine encrypted backups before those age out, and we do not use those backups to restore a deleted chat.
What deletion cannot reach is anything that left the service while the link was live. If someone screenshotted the page, saved it, printed it, or forwarded the URL to a person who did, those copies are beyond any control we have. This is true of every link on the internet, and it is worth being clear about rather than implying a delete button is a recall.
If you cleared your browser and lost the master link
This is the situation the master link exists to prevent, and it is recoverable. Losing both does not mean the conversation is published forever.
Write to team@preserve.chat with the public link you want removed and a short note explaining that you created it. We will remove it once we are reasonably satisfied that it is yours to remove. Because there is no account behind a shared chat, we cannot check this against a sign-in, so we may ask you something only the person who made the share would know.
Do not paste the conversation itself into the email. The URL is enough, and sending us more of it than we need to find the page does not help.
If someone else shared a conversation with you in it
You do not need an account to ask for a shared conversation to be taken down. Write to team@preserve.chat with the link and a short explanation of why it should not be public, for example that it contains your personal information, was shared without your consent, or is being used to harass you.
We take these seriously and act on them. Where we need something from you to identify the right page, we will ask for the minimum that does the job.
The export file on your own device
The TXT or ZIP file WhatsApp created is yours and sits wherever you saved it: the phone, a download folder, cloud storage, or an email you sent yourself. Deleting a shared link does not touch any of those, and we never had them in the first place.
If you are clearing up after a dispute, that file is usually the copy worth keeping and the one worth storing somewhere you control.