Nobody gets
your number.
You know how this usually goes. You tap “contact owner” on some portal, and within the hour four brokers you have never spoken to are calling about a flat that went last month. Your number is now on a list.FoundNow has no way to give your number to an owner. Not a setting you have to go and find — the feature was taken out of the product.
You can search, open any listing and read its comments without an account at all.
- No contact swap
- Removed from the product, endpoint and all.
- 150 m
- Every public map pin, offset from the real door.
- Once per search
- Location read when you search, blocked in the background.
- 21:00 – 08:00
- No push notification of any kind, bar a security alert.
Each one is a line of shipped behaviour. Every section below is the one it comes from.
There was a handshake here.
It is gone.
FoundNow used to have a contact swap: you offered your number, the owner offered theirs, and the two became visible once both had. It was removed — not switched off, not hidden behind a button nobody renders. The endpoint was deleted, so there is no request a client could make that would hand your number to an owner.
- Every conversation happens inside FoundNow, attached to one listing.
- You can stop replying, and there is nothing left over for anyone to call.
- Nobody can pass your number to the next owner, because nobody has it.
- An owner cannot ask the app for your number and be refused — there is nothing to ask.
- FoundNow does not sell or share your details with anyone.
Removing the endpoint rather than the button is the whole point. A rule enforced by a missing button holds only for the app that happens to be installed today.
Numbers are not exchanged in FoundNow.
What an owner sees when you message
Not a phone book. Your name and your photo if you have set one — enough for an owner to recognise you when you turn up to see the flat, and nothing they could dial.
The fields an owner's leads page actually reads. Names shown are illustrative; the fields are not.
- Your full name
- Shown deliberately. It used to be “Priya S.” until a visit was agreed, and an owner could not match that to the person standing at their gate.
- Your photo
- Only if you added one. There is no requirement to.
- Your number
- Never. Not on the enquiry, not on the conversation, not after a visit.
- Your email
- Never.
- Your saved places
- Home, office or college stay on your side. They shape your search results and are never shown to an owner.
The pin is not the door
Every public map position on FoundNow is offset by 150 metres in a random direction. The offset is generated once, when the listing is created, and stored — so it does not shuffle between page loads, and no amount of reloading will average it back to the real point.
150 m is the shipped value. Drawn to scale against a two-street block.
- Fixed, not live
- A pin that jittered on every load would be both distracting and, over enough samples, reversible by averaging. It is calculated once and kept.
- The street address
- Returned to the listing’s own owner and to nobody else. A seeker gets the locality — Hiran Magri, Bhuwana, Sector 11 — and the approximate pin.
- The true coordinates
- Same rule. Search results, the map and the listing page all carry the offset position, for every seeker, signed in or not.
- Distance is still honest
- “1.2 km from your office” is measured from the real point. You get an accurate distance without an accurate address.
Read once, when you search
Most apps that ask for location ask for it forever. FoundNow asks when you press search, uses it to work out what is near you, and stops. There is no background tracking to switch off, because the Android build refuses the background-location permission outright — it cannot be granted, even by accident.
Foreground only, by build
Your browser asks, and you can say no
Search from a place you saved
Nothing buzzes at night
Between 21:00 and 08:00 India time, FoundNow does not send a push notification. Not for a message, not for a room that just went up, not for a visit confirmed for next Tuesday. The rule is read in Asia/Kolkata rather than on the server's clock, which sits in UTC.
- 20:58
An owner replies about the flat you asked about
Two minutes before the silence starts, so your phone lights up as normal.PushSent - 23:40
Another owner replies
The phone stays dark. The notification row is written and the email goes, both waiting to be found in the morning. Only the interruption is dropped — it is not queued up to arrive nine hours stale.HeldPushWrittenIn-appSentEmail - 08:00
The silence lifts
Anything that happens from here buzzes normally. Nothing that was held is re-sent; it is already in your list.
This used to govern one feature — the “new place near you” alert — which meant the product was careful about its least urgent notification and careless about every other. It now sits in front of every push, on every device you own, phone and browser alike.
Every notification has a switch, and one piece of code obeys it
Push, in-app and email are separate settings for each kind of notification, because people genuinely want them split — a visit confirmation in your inbox without your phone buzzing about it is the commonest thing anyone asks for.
- Messages
- Push and in-app. Never email — a message that arrives twice is one you stop trusting either copy of.
- Visits
- Push, in-app and email. The confirmation is worth keeping.
- Saved places and rent drops
- Push and in-app.
- Marketing
- Off on every channel. Somebody who wants product news can say so; nobody should have to say they do not.
- SMS
- Off for every notification category. It is the one channel that cannot be ignored politely. The only text FoundNow sends you is your sign-in code, when you ask for one.
- Security alerts
- On, and locked. Shown in your settings as locked rather than hidden, so the guarantee is visible.
- Change a switch and it applies to every device signed into your account.
- Categories that do not apply to you are not shown at all — a seeker has no listings to have approved.
- A notification type nobody has classified yet is delivered rather than dropped: waiting for a reply that never arrives is the worse failure.
What you can report, and what happens next
A listing that was rented last month, a broker posing as an owner, photographs that are not of the place, a comment written to damage someone. All of it goes to one queue that people at FoundNow actually work through.
Reporting the same thing twice is not two complaints, and a queue that counted it twice would read as consensus — so only your first open report on a given item counts.
- 01
You report it
It is recorded against the listing as well as the comment, so one screen groups every complaint about a place together. - 02
Nothing disappears yet
A report does not hide anything by itself. If it did, a rival owner with three accounts could silence anybody they disliked. A person decides. - 03
Staff read it and act
The outcome and the takedown happen together, in one step — that is how a queue avoids filling up with reports marked handled while the listing they were about is still live. - 04
A staff takedown is not the owner's to undo
A rejected listing can be fixed and published again. A removed one stays down until somebody at FoundNow reverses it. A hidden comment is kept on file, not deleted — the words are the evidence if its author appeals.
What FoundNow does record
Every privacy page lists what a product does not collect. Here is what this one does — because you cannot judge the promises above without it.
- Your searches
- What you typed, roughly where you searched from, how wide the radius was and how many results came back. It is how we find out that people are searching for 1BHKs in Sector 4 and nobody is listing any. Tied to your account when you are signed in, and to nothing when you are not.
- Your conversations
- Kept, because both sides need to read them.
- Your notifications
- Deleted on a schedule. Ones you opened go after 60 days; ones you never opened are kept 180, in case they are still the reason you come back.
- Your visits
- Kept, and used to mark whether somebody writing about a place actually got inside it.
- Searching, opening a listing and reading its comments need no account at all.
- You sign in only to message, save a place or book a visit.
- Sign in with a one-time code to your phone or email, or with the password you set when you signed up.
- A new sign-in sends you an alert you cannot switch off.
The questions people actually ask
The full detail lives in the policy itself. It stays in English on purpose — the rest of the site has a Hindi toggle, but a legal translation nobody qualified has checked is worse than none, so those two pages wait for a lawyer who reads Hindi.
Now go and look at what is free.
No account needed to search, and no way for anyone to get your number when you do sign in. The listings you see have been confirmed as available by the person who owns them.
Searching, opening a listing and reading its comments need no sign-in at all.