Privacy

Spoqi has no accounts, no profiles and no sign-up. This page is what that means in practice.

Nothing is recorded

No video, no audio, no screenshots, no transcript of the text chat. There is no table for any of them and there will not be one. Video travels between the two browsers through a media server and is never written down anywhere.

One thing does happen inside your own browser: while you are chatting, it keeps a small picture of the last few people you were connected to, so that if you report someone you can see which chat you mean. Those pictures stay on your device, are never uploaded — not even with the report — and are gone the moment you close the tab.

Some checking happens on your own device

Your browser also downloads a small model and checks your camera locally, on your own machine. Those frames are examined where they are and never leave your device at all. If it sees nudity it switches your camera off straight away, before the other person sees more of it.

The frames used for moderation are not kept

While you are chatting, your browser sends a still from your own camera to our server every few seconds. It is passed to our automated moderation systems, judged, and dropped when the request finishes. It is not saved to disk, not attached to anything, and not written to a log. What is recorded is the outcome — the category and how confident the model was.

What is stored

• A random device id, in a cookie your browser keeps and this page cannot read. It means nothing outside our database.
• Your IP address, alongside that id, and only where a ban is involved.
• Moderation outcomes and reports — the category, a score, a timestamp.

That is the whole list, and all of it exists for one purpose: keeping somebody who was banned from walking straight back in.

A moderator may join your chat

Someone from Spoqi can join a chat that is in progress, see it and hear it, and speak to both people. This happens when something needs looking at — a report, or a moderation flag.

You are always told. A banner appears on your screen saying a moderator has joined, and stays there for as long as they are present, along with a panel showing them. There is no way for us to watch a chat without both people seeing that we are there, and there will not be one.

Nothing about a moderated chat is recorded either. The rules above apply without exception: no video, no audio, no transcript. Every time a moderator joins a call it is written to our internal log, so the action can be accounted for afterwards.

What the other person learns about you

Which country you appear to be connecting from, and nothing else. No name, no id, no address, no city, and nothing that survives the chat or could be used to find you again.

The country is worked out on our own server from your IP address, using a lookup table held here — your address is not sent anywhere to do it. It is approximate, and often wrong if you use a VPN. Nothing depends on it: it is shown next to the video and used for nothing else.

What we cannot stop

The person you are talking to can film their own screen. That is true here and everywhere else video chat exists, and it is worth knowing before you decide what to show a stranger.

Who else sees anything

Moderation runs on our own systems and on a specialist automated content-moderation service acting for us. That service receives the moderation still described above, and nothing else — not your messages, not your video, and nothing that identifies you. It processes the image to answer one question and does not keep it.

Video and audio are carried by our own server. There is no advertising, no tracking and no third-party scripts on this site, and nothing about you is sent to anybody for measurement, because there is nothing here to monetise.

The only numbers we keep

We count how busy the site is: how many pages were viewed on a given day, how many chats were started, and roughly how many different devices were around. That is genuinely all — one number per thing per day.

There is no record that your visit happened. No log of pages you opened, no timestamps, no addresses and no history. The daily totals are plain integers that go up; they cannot be taken apart again into the visits that made them.

The "roughly how many devices" figure deserves a word, because counting that usually means keeping a list of everybody. It does not here. Your device id is folded into a fixed-size summary — about two kilobytes a day whether ten people visit or ten million — which can estimate how many distinct devices were seen and is mathematically incapable of answering whether yours was one of them. The information needed for that question is never written down. The cost is that the number is approximate, which is fine for a figure whose only purpose is telling us whether Tuesday was busier than Monday.