Privacy

Last updated 16 September 2026. This page describes what actually happens, in plain words. Where a fact changes, this page changes with it.

There is no account

foen does not ask for a name, an email address, a phone number or a password, and it has no way to identify you. Your foen number is made on your own device from your twelve recovery words. We never see the words, and we cannot recover a number for you.

What stays on your device

Your browser keeps, for this site only:

• the key that signs your calls, held by the browser in a form that no web page, including ours, can read;
• your number, and the name you typed if you listed one;
• the last person you called and the calls you have answered or declined, so the page can offer a call-back button and not ring twice for the same call;
• your choice of look and of camera and microphone.

Clearing the site's data in your browser removes all of it. Your number can then be restored only from your words.

What passes through the relay

A call travels from your device to our relay and on to the other person's device. The content is encrypted end to end: at the start of every call the two devices agree a key that exists only in their two browsers and only for that call, and everything after that, picture and sound, is ciphertext. The relay cannot read a call, and neither can anyone who copies the traffic, now or later. Every fragment is also signed by the sender's number, so the other side can tell it came from you and not from us or anyone in between.

The relay holds the last few seconds of each call, a rolling window of about six seconds per direction, overwrites it continuously, and deletes what remains within an hour of the call ending. What the relay can see while a call runs is that two numbers are talking and when. It does not write that down.

What the relay stores

• The phone book, if you choose to list yourself: your name and your number, signed by your key, kept for thirty days after the last time you listed or refreshed it, then deleted. Listing is optional and off by default. Anyone can read the phone book; that is its purpose.
• Invitations: when someone calls you, a short signed note saying who is calling waits for your page to pick it up. It is overwritten by later invitations and deleted within an hour in any case.
• Contact messages, if you send one through the contact page: the message and whatever you chose to write in the reply line, kept until the operator has read and dealt with it. No address is stored with it.
• Nothing else. The relay keeps no access logs: no addresses, no times, no record of who called whom. The web server is configured without an access log. We cannot answer "who did this number call" because nothing records it.

Cookies

foen itself sets no cookies. It uses the browser's own storage for the items listed above, which never leave your device.

Advertising

foen is free and is paid for by advertising shown on the idle screen and after a call, never during one. An advertisement on foen is an image we host and a link we chose. Nothing from an advertiser or a network loads on the page, and nothing on the page tracks you. We count how many times each banner was shown and clicked, as plain numbers with nothing attached. If you follow a link, the site you arrive at may set its own cookies under its own policy, as any site does. You can turn the advertisements off under details.

Children

foen is a telephone. It collects nothing from anyone, and it has no features aimed at children.

Changes

If what the service does changes, this page is updated and the date at the top moves.