walkintalk← Backwalkintalk← BackLast updated: 17 October 2026.
walkintalk is run by Hertge VOF, President Kennedylaan 154, 2343 GV Oegstgeest, the Netherlands. Chamber of Commerce 88251918, VAT NL864554187B01. For anything in this statement, write to info@hertge.com.
Using walkintalk needs no account. There is no signup, we do not ask for an e-mail address, a phone number or a password, and there is no profile. You choose a nickname.
walkintalk puts you in the chat of the place where you are, so it needs to know roughly where that is. This is how that works, exactly:
On your phone. When you open the chat, your browser asks whether walkintalk may use your location. If you allow it, the page on your phone turns your position into a box on the map of about 1.2 by 0.6 kilometres (a 6-character "geohash"). Your exact position is not sent to us. Only that box is. While the chat is open, the page checks your position about once a minute, so the chat can move with you, and sends the box again when it changes.
On our server. From the box we work out the three chats around you (about 1 km, about 5 km and about 40 km across) and how many people are in each. The box is used for that answer and then forgotten: it is not stored and not written to any log of ours. While you are in a chat, the page also gives the box to that chat, so that Walky (see below) can look in the other two sizes for you; it is held with your connection only and forgotten when you leave the chat. The page keeps it in your browser's session storage until you close the tab.
What is stored. Each chat is named after its box, and messages are stored in the chat they were written in. So a message is linked to the box of its chat, the way a message in a room is linked to that room, but never to your exact position. Nobody, the operator included, can see how far away anybody is or who is where.
If you say no. Then we use the rough location that Cloudflare already works out from your internet connection on every request (usually a city, sometimes much less precise) to give you the chat of the region. That too is not stored.
Messages are stored so they stay visible in the chat, and are deleted six hours after they were written. Alongside each message we keep the time, the nickname and a short code for the browser it was written in. That code is made from a random number your browser keeps for walkintalk; it is not your IP address and it means nothing outside walkintalk. It is there so that somebody can block the writer (see below).
Your IP address is not stored with your messages. While you are connected it is held in memory, to check you are not banned from that chat and for the human check at the door. It is written down in one case only: if somebody is banned from a chat, that chat keeps the address so the ban can be enforced.
There are no private one-to-one messages on walkintalk.
When you are alone in a chat, Walky keeps you company. Walky is a bot, always marked as one. What Walky says, and what you write while you are alone with him, only you see; whoever comes in later does not. To answer you, the last few lines of your talk with Walky are sent to Cloudflare Workers AI, a language model run by Cloudflare. Nothing else about you is sent with them, and they are not used to train it.
So that Walky does not welcome you again in every chat you switch to, he remembers a few things about your browser for 24 hours, stored under your browser code (see Messages): whether he welcomed you, how often he spoke up and answered, when you last came into a chat, and his own last lines (for six hours, so he does not repeat himself). It holds no location, no chat names and nothing you wrote. After 24 hours without use it is deleted.
Reporting. If you report a message, a copy of it - with the chat, the nickname, the time and the browser code of the writer - goes to a list that only the operator can read, and is kept there for thirty days, also after the message itself has gone from the chat. The writer is not told, and nobody, the operator included, sees who reported it. If a reported message breaks our rules, we remove it and may remove its writer from walkintalk; the writer's browser code is then kept on a list for as long as that removal lasts.
Blocking. If you block somebody, we keep a list of the browser codes you blocked, stored under your own browser code, so that their messages stop reaching you in every chat. Each entry is kept for ninety days, at most fifty entries, and removed when you unblock. The person you blocked is not told.
The operator of walkintalk has an administration page that can show the messages in a chat. It is used to deal with abuse reports and to keep the service running, not to read along. If confidentiality from us is what you need, walkintalk is the wrong tool.
No cookies are set by the chat. In your browser's local storage the page keeps a random id for this browser, your last nickname, a token that says you passed the human check (so you are not asked again), that you confirmed you are 16 or older, and your choices for theme, sound and language. It does not keep a list of the chats or places you have been in. In session storage, which is cleared when you close the tab, it keeps the box described above and a pass for each of the three chats around you. You can clear all of it by clearing the site data for walkintalk.com.
Under the message box there is one line of text, marked Ad when it is a paying sponsor. No advertising network is involved: no third-party script, no cookie, no pixel, and nothing about you is used to choose the line. We count how often each line was shown and clicked, per country (from Cloudflare), and never link that to you or your messages.
walkintalk runs on Cloudflare. Cloudflare delivers the site, and so processes the technical details of your connection, and, where it is switched on, runs the Turnstile check that keeps automated traffic out. Each chat is held by Cloudflare in a data centre that Cloudflare picks, usually near where the chat was first opened; for a chat in Europe that is normally in Europe, but it is not guaranteed to be inside the European Union.
We use Clicky to see how many people visit and roughly where they come from. It records the page visited, the referring page, the country, and the browser and device type, and it only starts after you have tapped, scrolled or typed, or after twenty seconds on the page. Clicky never receives your location or the box described above: every chat is reported to it simply as "/chat", and links you follow out of a chat tell the next site only "walkintalk.com". We do not use any of it to build advertising profiles and we do not sell data. Our own server also counts totals - chats opened, messages sent, minutes spent - without anything that identifies you. You can stop Clicky by turning on Do Not Track or a tracking blocker in your browser.
We use your location, which you choose to share, to provide the service you asked for. For spam protection, abuse handling and keeping the service running we rely on our legitimate interest in a service that works and is not abused. Where the law requires it, we respond to requests from the authorities.
You can ask to see your data, to have it corrected, or to have it deleted, at info@hertge.com. Because we hold no account, we can only find your data by the browser code; we will tell you how to look it up. If you think we are handling your data badly, you can complain to the Dutch Data Protection Authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens).
This text describes what the service actually does. It has not been reviewed by a lawyer.