Privacy Policy

What we collect

• Phone number: required to create an account and log in, verified with a one-time code.
• Name: required at signup, shown to other users on your listings and enquiries.
• Email: optional, only if you add one when signing up or later in account settings.
• Listing content: anything you submit when publishing a property: description, price, location, and photos.
• Usage data: how you use the site, such as the pages you visit, what you click, how far you scroll, your searches, the listings and photos you look at, and recordings of your visits. See the note on analytics below.
• A session cookie: keeps you logged in; it's essential to the site working.
• A visitor cookie: a random ID with no name, number, or other personal details in it, kept for up to a year. It lets us count how many different people use the site each day, and tie together what one browser does across visits, whether you're logged in or not. It isn't used for advertising.
• Analytics cookies and storage: PostHog and Google Analytics each keep a random ID in your browser so they can recognise it on your next visit.

Listings we post for homeowners

Some homeowners would rather not list a property themselves. When one asks us to, our team creates an account for them using the name and phone number they give us, and publishes the listing on their behalf. That listing works like any other: their name shows on it, and their phone number is shown to renters who choose to reveal it, exactly as described below.

The homeowner can take over the account at any time by logging in with a one-time code sent to that number, and can then edit or delete the listing themselves. If you find a listing posted under your name or number that you didn't ask for, contact us and we'll take it down and delete the account.

How we use it

To run the marketplace: log you in, show your listings to renters, let renters reach landlords, review reports, and understand which parts of the product work and which don't. We don't sell your data, and we don't use it for anything beyond operating and improving Nawa Niwas.

Who else sees it

A landlord's phone number is shown to a renter only after that renter explicitly chooses to reveal it on a listing, never before, and never in search results. Once a listing is marked as rented, its number isn't shown at all. When you reveal a landlord's number, that landlord can see your name, your phone number, and when you did it, in their list of enquiries for that listing, so they know who may call. Beyond that, we use a small set of providers to run the platform: Neon (database hosting), Vercel (application hosting and photo storage), Nest SMS (sends your sign-in codes, so it receives your phone number and the code), PostHog (product analytics), Google Analytics (visitor statistics), and Sentry (error monitoring: if something crashes, it receives the error details and the page you were on, not your listing or account data). Each only receives what's necessary to provide that service. Google handles Google Analytics data under its own privacy policy.

Maps on the site come from OpenStreetMap. When a landlord places a property on the map, the area they type or the spot they pin is also looked up through OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service. Both go straight from your browser to OpenStreetMap, so it sees your IP address the way any website you load does. It's a public, non-commercial service with its own privacy policy, and we don't send it your account details.

Analytics

We record how the site is used, in detail, so we can see what works, where people get stuck, and how Nawa Niwas grows over time. Using PostHog, that means the pages you visit, the buttons and links you click, how far you scroll, your searches and filters, the listings and photos you look at, how quickly pages load for you, and recordings of your visits that replay what happened on screen. If you have an account, this is linked to it, including what you did before you logged in on that browser. Your device type, browser, screen size, approximate location (from your IP address) and the site that sent you are recorded too.

Recordings never include what you type into forms, such as sign-in codes, passwords or phone numbers, and phone numbers and email addresses shown on the page are blanked out of them. We use Google Analytics to understand where visitors come from, such as search engines or social media. We keep this data for as long as it's useful for understanding the site, and we don't sell it or use it to show you adverts.

We also use Sentry to catch crashes and bugs, which can include the page URL and technical details about what went wrong at the time.

Your choices

You can delete your account yourself, from Account when you're logged in. That deletes your account, your listings and their photos, your saved properties, notifications and enquiries straight away. Our nightly backups, kept for 30 days in case something has to be recovered, still hold a copy until they expire. Records of how the site was used, kept by our analytics tools, aren't deleted with the account; ask us and we'll remove them. To ask what we hold about you, email us. See Contact.

Children

Nawa Niwas is intended for adults entering rental agreements, not for children.

Changes

If how we collect or use data changes, we'll update this page and its date at the top.