I used AirTalk for about a month before I started building this. It does roughly the same sort of thing as Wildcard and every 30 or so calls you would get someone who was fine. The rest of the time was an absolute disaster. The reason I stopped, though, was less about the calls and more about what lies behind the shoddy late 90s design of their website.
Go and read the AirTalk terms of service properly. First thing you might notice is they have left a blank line where the owner should be, although later on it’s clear their company is based in Hungary. There’s a clause in there that just lets them straight up listen to your audio any time they want. Not “recordings can be reviewed if someone reports you” — they can actually monitor live audio at their discretion. It’s wrapped in safety language, but the intent is clear: “we have the technical and legal capability to do this whenever we like.” Once you know that clause is there, you can’t un-know it.
The difference is stark: their homepage and about page sell “voice-only”, “anonymous”, “trust”, “safety”, “privacy”, and “no sign up”, while the legal pages describe snooping, profiling, adtech, and third-party sharing. The extent of the third-party sharing did not become clear until I discovered the 1,611 partners they are sharing my data with.
It made sense once I looked at the rest of the stack. AirTalk routes calls through their own servers. In WebRTC terms that’s an SFU, which is a fancy way of saying “the audio goes through us, not directly between you and the other person.” If your audio is moving through someone else’s server, that person could do whatever they like with it.
The other part of it was the lack of moderation. I had multiple calls where the person on the other end said something that should have got them banned in any platform that took itself seriously. I reported them. Nothing happened. There wasn’t even a “thanks, we got your report” automated reply. The form felt like it went to a folder no one was opening. Later as I used it more, the same abusive people kept coming on and on all the time, the same sort of thing Omegle got sued and taken offline for.
So I started writing this in my spare time.
The two things that were going to be different from the start were the technical design and the moderation. Wildcard is peer to peer. The audio goes from your browser to the other person’s browser directly. The only thing the Wildcard server does is help you find each other and then get out of the way. Once you’re talking I’m not in the middle, I can’t listen, and there isn’t a server-side recording because there isn’t a server-side anything. There’s some infrastructure for helping the signal to get through awkward home routers, but those are relays of encrypted media. They simply forward data without being able to read it.
The moderation has been designed to be robust. It runs through manual reports and a rating system powered by the users. After every call you give a thumbs up, a thumbs down, or a block. The ratings change how the user is dealt with in the queue, and people who collect too many downvotes automatically get cooled down. There’s a human moderator for the worst cases and reports get acted on, usually within a day.
Wildcard is one person’s reaction to a product that disappointed them. I wanted random voice chat without the server sitting in the middle, without someone able to snoop on my calls, without reports vanishing into a hole, and without pretending privacy is a feature while the terms say something entirely different.
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