How to chat with strangers anonymously and stay anonymous

Anonymity is not a setting. It is the sum of what a site holds about you and what you tell people yourself, and the second half is the one that actually goes wrong.

This page is the odd one out in the guide: it cites nothing, because its subject is how this site works rather than a body of research. Everything below is either a fact about how this one is built or ordinary practice about staying unidentifiable. None of it is a finding and none of it is dressed as one.

What a site has to not have

Most "anonymous" chat isn't. The usual arrangement is a display name over an account tied to an email address, a phone number, or a login from somewhere else — which means the operator can connect everything you have ever said to a real identity, and so can anyone who compels or breaches them. A nickname on top of that is a costume, not anonymity.

The test is simple: what could this site tell somebody about me if it wanted to? If the answer includes an email address, it isn't anonymous. Everything else is detail.

How this one is built

Here, an account is an access code and nothing else. There is no name, no email address, no phone number and no password, and no sign-in through another service. We hold no IP addresses. Nothing here is tracked or handed to an advertising network.

That has a cost, and it is not a small one: lose your access code and the account is gone. There is no recovery, because recovery requires knowing something about you, and we deliberately know nothing. That trade is the whole design. If it sounds unacceptable, this is the wrong kind of site — that is a real answer, not a discouragement.

Conversations are not kept either. Closing a conversation deletes it immediately, for both people, and any pictures in it are erased from disk rather than merely unlinked. Anything you don't close is deleted on a schedule anyway. The one exception is a conversation somebody reports: the reported part is copied where an admin can judge it, and that copy outlives the ordinary deletion — the privacy notice sets out every period.

And because the risk on an anonymous site runs in both directions, pictures other people send you arrive blurred and stay that way until you choose to open one. You can stop a particular person sending them at all. None of that is privacy in the sense above — it is the same idea pointed the other way, so that seeing something is a decision rather than an accident.

What you leak yourself

This is the part no site can do for you, and it is where anonymity is almost always lost.

• Don't reuse a handle. A nickname you have used anywhere else — a game, a forum, an old email address — is searchable, and it links this account to all of them. Pick something you have never used before and will never use again.
• Details compose. No single fact identifies you. Your town, your job, your age and the thing that happened at work last week identify you completely. People give these away one at a time over an hour without noticing the total.
• Pictures carry more than they show. Backgrounds, uniforms, reflections, a view from a window. And a picture you have posted anywhere else is a reverse-image search away from your name.
• A rename is not a new identity. Every nickname a persona has used stays listed on its profile, where anyone you talk to can see it. That is deliberate — it stops people shedding a reputation — but it does mean a name change is a change of label, not a fresh start.
• Nobody here is staff unless they carry the badge, and staff never ask for your access code. Not to verify you, not to fix anything, not ever. Anyone asking is taking your account.

The bit that is about the other person

Everyone here is unverified — age, gender, place, intentions, all self-declared. That is the design, and it applies to the person you are talking to exactly as it applies to you.

So the sensible posture is not suspicion, it's just not treating anything as established. Don't move to another platform on someone's word, don't send anything you would mind seeing again, and don't let a good conversation become a reason to hand over the one detail that undoes all of the above. The house rules cover what is expected of everyone here, including the rule against pushing anybody for their real identity.

Why any of this is worth the inconvenience

Because it is what makes the conversations different. A great deal of what people would like to say to somebody goes unsaid because of who might connect it to them later, and removing that doesn't just protect you — it changes what is available to talk about. That is the same territory as getting past small talk, approached from the other end.