Privacy

Last updated October 19, 2026.

FoundPet is free and made by Poo Squad. It has no ads, no analytics, and no tracking cookies. We never sell or share your information for marketing.

Browsing

You never need an account to browse the map, a post, or Back home. Pages load map tiles from OpenFreeMap and the Manrope font from Google Fonts, so those services see your IP address when your browser fetches them. Everything else, including photos, comes from our own servers on Cloudflare.

If your browser has already allowed location for this site, the map uses it to show how far each post is from you. That stays on your phone.

Signing in

You sign in with a text code to post, add a sighting, or use Contact. Codes are sent and checked by Twilio Verify, which receives your phone number for that. Only US numbers can sign in. We store your number two ways: a one-way hash to recognize you, and encrypted so Contact can show it (below). A sign-in lasts 7 days; we store only a hash of the session token. To limit abuse we keep your IP address for up to one hour when you ask for a code.

Posting a lost or found pet

A post shows the photos, the details you typed, the pin you dropped, and the nearest street names. To find those street names we send the pin's coordinates (nothing else) to two OpenStreetMap services: Nominatim and komoot's Photon.

Photos are shrunk and re-encoded on your phone before upload, and our server strips any remaining location and camera data (EXIF) before storing them, so a photo can't reveal where it was taken.

Posts come down after 14 days unless you keep them up. When you mark a pet reunited, the post leaves the map and stays on its page and in Back home for a year. You can take your post down at any time from the post itself.

Two days before a post comes down we plan to text you a reminder. Right now those reminders are stored and not sent.

Contact

Your phone number is never shown on a post or a card. Someone who has verified their own phone can tap Contact on your post, and then they see your number to call or text you. We record who tapped and when, and limit each person to 5 posts a day.

Sightings

A sighting stores the pin, the time, an optional photo (stripped the same way), and one line. The poster, and anyone following the post, gets a notification.

Alerts

If you turn on alerts, your browser gives us a push address from its push service (Apple, Google, or Mozilla) and we store the alert area you picked, with the center rounded to about a block. If you tap "Alert me on new sightings" on a post, we store that the push address follows that post. Turning alerts off deletes both.

Reports

A report stores the post or sighting and the reason you picked. If you are signed in we store your account; if not, a one-way hash of your IP address, so one person can't report the same thing twice. Your IP address itself is kept for up to one hour to limit repeat reports.