Privacy Policy

Overview

WeatherRoam is a weather and travel time app that lets you tap locations on a map to see weather forecasts and driving times. We are committed to protecting your privacy and being transparent about what data we use.

Location Data

WeatherRoam uses your device's location to center the map on your current position and to calculate driving times from your location to places you select on the map. Location is optional -- the map, forecasts, and destination comparison work without it.

To answer a request, the coordinates you select (and, when you use it, your current position) are sent to the weather and mapping providers listed below. This is how the app works: we cannot fetch a forecast for a place without telling the forecast provider which place. Your location data is:

• Used only in real time, to answer the request you made
• Never stored in a database, never linked to an account, and never linked to your identity
• Shared with the providers listed below only as needed to fulfil that request -- never sold, and never shared for advertising
• Never used for tracking or advertising

Our servers keep short-lived operational logs and error reports to diagnose problems. Coordinates in those records are rounded to roughly 11 kilometres, which is enough to tell us which region a failure came from but not where you are. Those logs rotate automatically and are not archived.

Separately, we keep a small set of records with no end date. To check how well our forecasts and Weekend Pick results hold up, a forecast record holds one or two dates, the forecast for those days and the verdicts we gave them, with no place, and a Weekend Pick record holds the search location rounded to the nearest half degree of latitude and longitude (about 55 kilometres north to south, and up to that east to west, narrowing toward the poles), how far you chose to drive, which days and sort order you asked for, and how many towns were considered. To track what we pay our data providers, we keep daily counts of the requests we send them. To see which shared links get loaded, each request for a shared link's landing page is recorded with the link's source tag, a short label set by whoever made the link, and the kind of client that asked: an Apple device, an Android device, a computer or an automated fetcher such as a link preview. The forecast, Weekend Pick and landing-page records each carry the time they were written, so records made in the same moment could be matched to one another. We do not write an account, a device identifier, an IP address or a place name into any of these records. The one field we do not control is a shared link's source tag, which holds whatever short label the link was given.

Place Search

When you search for a place by name, the text you type is sent through our server to Open-Meteo, which returns matching places and their coordinates. We treat what you search for as sensitive: it is deliberately excluded from our analytics and from our error reports, and it is not written to our logs.

The ChatGPT Plugin

WeatherRoam also offers a plugin for ChatGPT that suggests nearby towns where the weekend forecast looks good. When ChatGPT calls it, our server receives the place you asked about (if you named one), how far you are willing to drive, and the approximate, city-level location ChatGPT attaches to the request. It also receives an anonymous identifier that OpenAI creates for this plugin alone. We never receive your conversation, your name, your email or your ChatGPT account details.

• To find forecasts we send the coordinates of the candidate towns, not your own location, to Open-Meteo. If you name a small place that is not in our own list, its name is sent to Open-Meteo to look up where it is.
• To judge whether a town's weather looks good we send that town's name, its state or province, the dates and its forecast to TypeSafe, as described below. Your location is not sent.
• To apply a fair daily limit, and to see whether people use the plugin again on a later weekend, we keep a one-way scrambled form of the anonymous identifier with a count of that day's searches and the weekend each successful search was for. We cannot turn it back into the identifier, it is not linked to anything else, and it is deleted after 30 days.
• We keep hourly totals, such as how many searches were answered and how long they took. Our logs for the plugin contain counts only, never places or coordinates.
• The "Open in WeatherRoam" link contains the coordinates of the suggested towns and your starting point rounded to about one kilometre, so the app can show them on its map. When that link is opened we count the visit and the kind of device, and nothing else.

OpenAI's own privacy policy covers what ChatGPT itself collects and keeps.

Third-Party Services

WeatherRoam uses the following third-party services to provide its functionality:

• WeatherAPI.com -- to retrieve weather forecast data for map locations you select, and to retrieve weather alerts for locations outside the United States
• Open-Meteo -- to turn a place name you search for into map coordinates, and to retrieve the weather forecasts the ChatGPT plugin uses. Place data is derived from GeoNames and used under the CC BY 4.0 licence.
• Google Maps -- to calculate driving travel times on Android devices and in older iOS versions of the app, and to display the interactive map on Android devices
• Apple Maps -- to calculate driving travel times in current iOS versions of the app, and to display the interactive map on iOS devices
• National Weather Service (weather.gov) -- to retrieve official weather alerts for locations inside the United States
• TypeSafe -- to judge weather in everyday terms, such as whether a place you pinned looks good for the weekend or on the days of your trip. It receives only that place's name, its state or country, the dates in question, and the forecast for that place, one place at a time, never coordinates. Its answers may shape what the app tells you, for example whether a place is described as looking good. TypeSafe does not train its models on this data.

Forecast, place-search, driving-time and alert requests are made through our server, so for those your device does not contact the provider directly and your IP address is not exposed to them. We send only what the request requires: the geographic coordinates of the location concerned, the place-name text you typed, or, for TypeSafe, a place's name, state or country, dates, and forecast. We never send your name, email, device identifier, or any account information, because the app does not collect them.

The map itself is the exception. Apple Maps on iOS and Google Maps on Android are drawn by the operating system on your device, so your device contacts those map services directly to fetch map imagery, and their own privacy policies apply to that contact. We do not control or receive that traffic.

Analytics and Diagnostics

To understand how the app is used and to find and fix problems, we collect a small amount of anonymous, non-personal data through the following services:

• PostHog: anonymous product analytics, such as which features are used (for example, dropping a pin or comparing destinations), your app version and device type, and a random identifier that is not linked to your name or identity. We do not send your location, the places you search, or any content you enter.
• Sentry: crash and error diagnostics, including error reports along with device and app-version information, so we can fix bugs and keep the app stable. Error reports may include a coordinate rounded to roughly 11 kilometres, so we can tell which region a failure affected. They never include a precise position or the text you searched for.

One thing worth being explicit about: like most analytics services, PostHog derives an approximate location (typically country and city) from the network address your request arrives from. This happens on their side, not ours -- the app does not send your position to them -- but the result is that approximate, city-level location is associated with anonymous analytics events. Turning off "Share anonymous usage data" in Settings stops those events being sent at all, and therefore stops this too.

This data is anonymous, is never sold, and is never used for advertising or to track you across other apps or websites. You can turn it off at any time in the app's Settings.

Data Collection

Beyond the anonymous analytics and diagnostics described above, WeatherRoam does not:

• Require account creation or login
• Collect personal information (name, email, etc.)
• Sell your data or share it for advertising
• Track you across other apps or websites
• Display advertisements

Your Choices and Data Deletion

You are in control of the anonymous data described above:

• Opt out: turn off "Share anonymous usage data" in the app's Settings to stop analytics collection at any time.
• Request deletion: email support@weatherroam.com to request deletion of data associated with your device. Because this data is anonymous and not tied to an account, please include the approximate date and your device model so we can locate and remove it.
• Reset your identifier: reinstalling the app or clearing its data generates a new anonymous identifier.

We retain analytics and diagnostic data only as long as needed to improve the app.

Children's Privacy

WeatherRoam does not knowingly collect any personal information from children. The app does not require any personal data to function.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. Any changes will be posted on this page with an updated revision date.

Contact

If you have questions about this privacy policy, please contact us at support@weatherroam.com.