Meta confirmed that the company is working on the ability to permanently delete a Thread account without deleting the associated Instagram account. Earlier this year, Meta announced Threads to compete with Musk’s X (formerly Twitter). However, the app lacks one key feature which is the ability to delete an account without also deleting the associated Instagram account.

now b Tech Crunch Disrupt, Michel Protti, Meta’s chief privacy officer for the product confirmed that the company was working on the feature. He further noted that Meta aims to roll it out to Threads users by December.

Technically, it was extremely challenging to allow deleting a separate Threads account without also deleting your overall Instagram account out of the gate. We have therefore taken special care to ensure that the user can still exercise their deletion rights, by disabling the account to hide all content, setting it to private or deleting individual threads.

Protti mentioned that since Threads is tied to Instagram, it was quite challenging for the company to build a system that separates the two services when someone decides to delete Threads but keep their Instagram account active.

Furthermore, Threads has been looking into Fediverse integration which will allow Threads users to publish content on decentralized platforms like Mastodon. However, this added to the problem because Meta has to think about how to handle a Fediverse post if the author deletes it or disables their account.

Last week, screenshots of the delete profile appeared on X confirming that Meta was working on the feature. According to the screenshots, Meta will permanently delete your data 30 days after deleting the profile. Furthermore, you will not be able to open a new account with the same Instagram account for up to 120 days.

The Meta-owned Threads app rose to success immediately after its launch in July, reaching two million signups in just a few hours. Over the months, Meta has been actively updating the service with new features including the desktop interface, the ability to search for keywords and more.