If you're looking for personal habits to stay anonymous in a conversation — what not to say, how to spot social engineering — that's covered in our staying anonymous guide. This page is about the system itself: why Chatzyo doesn't need your identity to begin with, and what that does and doesn't protect you from.
A lot of identity exposure on other platforms doesn't come from a sophisticated attack — it comes from a profile that already existed. A username tied to an email, a bio with a real name, a photo gallery. Chatzyo doesn't have any of that. There's no "About Me" section, no saved profile, no account that could be looked up, breached, or connected to anything else you've done online. The only information visible to the person you're talking to is whatever you choose to show on camera or type, in that moment, in that session.
This isn't a feature layered on top of an account system — there's no account system underneath it to begin with. That's a meaningfully different (and simpler) guarantee than a platform that collects an account and then promises to protect it carefully.
A concrete way to think about the difference: if a platform with accounts is ever breached, there's a database of usernames, emails, and possibly more, sitting somewhere, that becomes exposed. On Chatzyo, there's no equivalent database to breach in the first place — not because we've secured it exceptionally well, but because it was never built. The protection comes from the absence of the thing, not from defending it after the fact.
Some identity protection here isn't something Chatzyo built specifically — it comes from how modern browsers handle WebRTC generally. Since around 2019, Chrome and most other major browsers automatically mask your local network address using a technique called mDNS when negotiating a WebRTC connection, which used to be a known privacy gap in the standard. This happens at the browser level for any WebRTC-based site, Chatzyo included — it's not something we added ourselves, but it does genuinely benefit you while using the platform.
Your public-facing IP address is a separate matter — that one can still be visible to the person you're matched with as a normal part of how WebRTC establishes a direct connection, which is why a VPN is worth considering if that specifically concerns you, as covered in our anonymity guide.
This is a fair question, and the honest answer is more limited than a more impressive-sounding one might suggest: enforcement happens at the IP address level, not through a device fingerprint or hardware identifier. We don't track your specific device — we don't have a system that does that — we restrict the IP address connecting to the platform, for a period ranging from 24 hours to 30 days depending on severity, or permanently for the most serious violations, exactly as described in our Terms of Service.
This means identity protection and accountability aren't in perfect tension here, but they're not perfectly resolved either — IP-based enforcement is a real, working system, just not an unbreakable one. We think that tradeoff is the right one for a platform built without accounts, and we'd rather describe it accurately than oversell it as something more sophisticated.
It's worth being direct about the limits too. Not having an account protects you from data breaches of an account database that doesn't exist, and from a profile being cross-referenced with other platforms. It doesn't protect you from what you choose to say or show during a conversation — that part is entirely up to you, and it's the part our staying anonymous guide actually covers in detail. The system-level protection and your own conversational habits are two different layers, and both matter.