Privacy and weather apps
Over the last year, there have been many reports about weather apps completely disregarding users privacy.
It's quite insidious, as the weather is something we check every day and weather apps seem to have a reasonable reason to ask for your location.
Coupled with the fact that these apps are usually free and have access to a huge amount of user's location information, they are able to construct big datasets of user bahaviour. Some companies pay a good amount of money for such datasets and, as a result, weather apps have been caught, time and time again selling your location data.
Even, one would think respected brands, such as IBM's The Weather Channel are accused of exploiting your private information.
I personally think it's unacceptable, and I'm not alone. According to Fathom Analytics' survey, 94% of people are moderate to extremely concerned with their digital privacy.
So what about Weather on the Way?
Weather on the Way provides a weather forecast for your route, so it does ask for your location for it to work. However, this information is only used to provide the required functionality and nothing else. The data is used in the app and your location and other personal information is never sent to our servers in any form and not even stored in the app beyond immediate use.
Since we do not send your location, we cannot store it. And since we cannot store it, we cannot sell it. We will never sell your data.
Weather on the Way is not, and will never be an app that you pay for with your privacy. How can we do that? Money. We will charge money.
Now, Weather on the Way does access external services to provide the weather forecast and routing directions.
As of now it relies on Apple’s Routing API and DarkSky Weather API (now bought by Apple) so please review Apple's privacy policies (under Location-Based Services).
Apple does have a good track record with privacy, and we will monitor the situation to make sure that the data sources we use align with our privacy considerations.
Also no web tracking
Our privacy protections extend to our website, as we do not use Google Analytics but a private alternative that does not store any of your personal information and does not use tracking cookies.
You can review our privacy policy at weatherontheway.app/privacy. If you have any questions, let me know privacy@weatherontheway.app.
Piotr Knapczyk, Weather on the Way
