Plenty of people use Incognito, Private Browsing, or InPrivate mode while using Chatzyo, and it's a reasonable habit. Worth being precise about what it actually does, though — it's a real privacy tool with real limits, and knowing the difference matters more than the name suggests.
Opening Chatzyo in a private window creates a temporary browsing session that your browser treats differently from your normal one:
Any cookies or session data from your visit are deleted the moment you close the private window — nothing carries over to your next regular browsing session.
Your visit to chatzyo.in, or any specific room you used, won't appear in your browser's history afterward.
Anything you typed — a username, a message — isn't remembered by the browser for next time.
Browsers generally don't remember permission grants — like camera or microphone access — across private sessions, by design. That's not a Chatzyo setting; it's how Incognito and Private Browsing are built to work in every major browser, specifically so a site can't retain access once the private session ends. Expect the camera/microphone prompt every time you open a new private session, even if you granted it five minutes ago in a previous one.
This is the part worth being genuinely clear about, since the name "private" can imply more than it delivers:
Still visible as a normal part of how the connection works — incognito mode doesn't change this. If IP visibility specifically concerns you, a VPN addresses that; incognito mode doesn't.
Can still see that you connected to chatzyo.in. Incognito mode is a browser-side feature — it has no effect on what your ISP can observe at the network level.
If you're on a managed network, an administrator can typically still see the traffic, regardless of which browsing mode you're using.
For genuine anonymity beyond what private browsing covers, pairing it with a VPN gets you closer — see our staying anonymous guide for the fuller picture.
WebRTC, the technology behind Chatzyo's video calls, used to have a known issue where it could expose a device's local network address during connection setup, even in a private browsing session. Modern browsers have addressed this — Chrome and most others have masked local addresses using a technique called mDNS since around 2019, which happens automatically for any WebRTC site, Chatzyo included. It's a browser-level fix rather than something we built specifically, but it does genuinely reduce that particular leak.
Incognito mode is convenient because it handles cleanup automatically, but it's not the only way to get a similar result. Using Chatzyo in a regular browser window and then manually clearing permissions and site data afterward achieves much the same outcome — it just takes an extra step instead of happening on its own when you close the window. Our guide on clearing camera, mic, and cookie permissions covers exactly how to do that on both desktop and mobile, if that fits your habits better than opening a private window each time.
No. It only affects what's stored on your own computer. Anyone you're matched with can still see your video and read your messages exactly as normal — incognito mode changes nothing about what they see.
Because private browsing modes don't retain permission grants between sessions, by design — this is standard behavior across browsers, not specific to Chatzyo.