Privacy · 7 min read
What a video call service can know about you
Content, metadata, account data and device data are four different things. A service can protect one and collect the rest — here is how to tell what you are giving away.
“We can't see your calls” can be entirely true while a service still knows who you speak to, how often, for how long, from where, and on what. Content is one category of information about a call. It is not the largest.
The four categories
1. Content. What was said and shown. This is what encryption protects, and the one most services talk about — see is your call really end-to-end encrypted.
2. Metadata. Who called whom, when, for how long, from which addresses. Almost never encrypted, because the service usually needs it to work at all. It's also the most revealing category per byte: a pattern of calls between two people at 2am, repeated weekly, tells a story without a word of content.
3. Account data. Your name, email, phone number, contact list, payment details, and the social graph joining them. This exists only because sign-up exists.
4. Device and usage data. IP address, rough location, operating system, browser, device model, plus whatever analytics and advertising code is on the page.
A service can be scrupulous about the first and generous with the other three. Most are.
What no account removes — and what it doesn't
An account-free service can't hold category three. There is no profile, no contact list, no number to link to anything else. That's a real reduction, and it's structural rather than a promise.
It doesn't erase the rest. Anything hosting a website still handles requests, and infrastructure providers process addresses and timestamps as a matter of course. Analytics, if present, sees visits. Being honest about that distinction is the difference between a privacy claim and a marketing one.
Peer-to-peer moves an address around, rather than removing it
Here's the trade that's easy to state backwards. In a server-routed call, both people send video to the company; neither learns the other's IP address, but the company gets both.
In a direct call, no company holds the media — but the two of you necessarily exchange addresses, because that's what sending packets to someone means. An IP address roughly indicates a city and an internet provider.
For calling people you know, that's plainly a good trade: they learn approximately what city you're in, and no company gets a copy of the call. For calling strangers, note that it's a trade rather than a straight win. If hiding your address from the other person is the requirement, a relay-based service is the right shape — or a VPN, with the connection caveats that brings.
Things worth checking for yourself
- Does anything appear after the call ends? A history entry, a transcript, a recording in a dashboard. If it's there for you, it's there for the operator.
- What does the sign-up ask for, and why? A phone number for a service that doesn't place phone calls is worth a second thought.
- Is there advertising anywhere? Ad code implies a relationship with an ad network, whatever the privacy page says about calls.
- Read the retention section, not the headline. “We don't sell your data” and “we don't keep records of who you called” are unrelated statements.
- Does the browser show a camera indicator when you expect it to? The one signal a website cannot fake.
Practical habits
- Treat a call link like a key: anyone holding it can use it. Send it privately.
- Close the tab when you're done, rather than leaving a call open in the background.
- Check what's behind you and what's on screen before sharing it.
- Clear site data to remove locally stored contacts and history from a shared computer.
- For a genuinely sensitive conversation, verify keys out of band, on a service that lets you.
What ClearChat holds
For completeness, since the same questions apply here: no accounts, so no profiles or contact lists. Calls are direct, so no media reaches a server. Saved contacts, labels and call history live in your browser's own storage and are never uploaded — clearing site data deletes them. The signalling relay forwards a handshake in memory and keeps no record of it. The site itself runs on Cloudflare and uses basic anonymous analytics, both of which see ordinary web request data.
And, as above, the two of you exchange IP addresses. That's the cost of there being no middle. The full detail is on the privacy page.