Privacy Policy

Last updated: 16 August 2026

ProxTalk lets you talk and chat with people within about 100 yards of you. This policy describes exactly what we collect, what we store, and what we cannot see. It is written to be accurate rather than reassuring; where something is stored on our servers, we say so plainly.

What we store

An account identifier. When you first open the app it creates a random token on your device. We store only a SHA-256 hash of it. We do not ask for your phone number or email.
A display name that you choose, which people near you can see.
An encryption key. Your device generates a keypair. The public half is stored so friends can send you encrypted messages. The private half never leaves your phone and we never receive it.
Chat history with friends, stored as ciphertext we cannot read (see below). Up to 500 messages per conversation.
Friends, blocks and reports, so those settings persist.
Echoes and beacons you leave at a place, including their coordinates, until they expire.
Not how often you meet people. The app can show how many separate days you have been near someone, but that count is kept on your own phone and is never sent to us. We hold no record of who has been near whom.
Coarse activity counts. To show how many people used the app in an area, we record that an account was active in a roughly 2 km grid square on a given day. No times, no paths. Counts below three are never displayed, so a count can never identify an individual. These rows are deleted after seven days.
Reports you file, including any message text your app attaches as evidence.

What we do not store

Voice. Audio is relayed between phones and never written to disk. There is no recording, no history, no replay.
Nearby chat. Messages sent to everyone in range are relayed and discarded. They are not saved anywhere.
Photos. Photos are forwarded chunk by chunk and never stored. They exist only on the two phones involved. If the recipient is offline, the photo simply does not send.
Your location history. We hold your most recent position only while you are connected, to work out who is within range. It is deleted when you disconnect and expires after 60 seconds without an update. We never build a location history, and we never share a coordinate with another user unless you explicitly send one.
Who you spend time with. Encounter counts are computed and stored on your device only. Because we never receive them, there is no co-presence graph on our servers for anyone to breach, request or subpoena.
Live captions. Speech is transcribed on your own device. Audio is never sent anywhere for transcription. Only the resulting text is relayed, and it is not saved.

Encryption

Messages, photos and drops between friends are end-to-end encrypted using X25519 key agreement and AES-256-GCM. We cannot read them. The server stores ciphertext, and the keys required to open it exist only on the two devices.

You can verify this in the app: open any friend conversation and tap the encryption bar to see six words derived from both public keys. If those words match on both phones, no one has substituted a key.

Two limits we want to be honest about. First, this is not forward secrecy: if someone obtained your private key, they could read that conversation's history. Second, voice and nearby chat are protected in transit but are not end-to-end encrypted, because the server routes them between participants.

Location

The app requests location access while in use. Your position is used to calculate distance to other people. Other users are shown only a distance, never your coordinates, and the direction shown on the radar is deliberately not your real bearing. If you use "share my location" or "walk me home", you are choosing to send your actual position to one specific friend.

Moderation and reports

You can block or report any person or piece of content. Reports are reviewed within 24 hours and accounts are removed for violations. Because friend messages are encrypted, a report includes a copy of the content taken from your device — that is the only way a human can review something we cannot read.

Deleting your data

Settings includes "Delete account". It permanently removes your account, display name, friends, blocks, chat threads, echoes, beacons, presence records and activity rows from our servers. This cannot be undone. Photos and messages already delivered to another person's phone remain on that phone, as they would with any messenger.

Children

ProxTalk is not intended for anyone under 17 and we do not knowingly collect information from children. If you believe a child is using the service, contact us and we will remove the account.

Sharing

We do not sell data, we do not run advertising, and we do not share your information with third parties. The service runs on servers we operate at Hetzner in Germany. If you sign in with Apple, Apple provides us with a stable identifier; we do not receive your Apple password.

Contact

Questions, complaints and data requests: support@proxtalk.net. We respond within 24 hours to reports and within seven days to other requests.