Update: A few people have asked about the popular Dark Sky weather app, which is well-reviewed and, unlike many other weather apps, costs money to buy. The whole weather app industry has shown itself to not be trustworthy enough to use. Or, better yet, use no weather app at all, and check the weather manually on a browser or on a separate device altogether. Apple’s first party apps, meanwhile, have shown themselves to be generally trustworthy with private data thus far (though Apple is complicit in an economic model that has allowed “free” apps that surreptitiously sell your data to flourish on the App Store.)

Use Google’s built-in weather information on Android, and use the built-in Weather app on iOS (which uses data from the Weather Channel anyway.) Google uses your location in a variety of ways as well, but if you’re on Android, well, there’s not much you can do to prevent the company from having it. There are surely some good, trustworthy third-party weather apps out there, but the whole well has been poisoned by others in the industry. The safest thing to do here, then, is to stop using third-party weather apps altogether. Thursday, the city of Los Angeles sued The Weather Channel for its alleged inappropriate use of location data-the lawsuit claims that the Weather Channel “takes advantage of its app’s widespread popularity by using it as an intrusive tool to mine users’ private geolocation data, which then sends to IBM affiliates and other third parties for advertising and other commercial purposes entirely unrelated to either weather or the Weather Channel App’s services.” Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that a popular app on the Google Play Store called “Weather Forecast-World Weather Accurate Radar” collects location data, email address, and phone IMEI identification numbers, while also attempting to secretly subscribe users to paid virtual reality platforms. Late last year, the New York Times found that both the WeatherBug app and the Weather Channel app were sending precise location data to third parties. This happens both among the weather apps that most people haven’t heard of and among some of the most popular and well-known apps out there.Īccuweather was caught in 2017 selling user location data to third parties even when users had location data turned off. Many of them then sell that data to advertisers and other data brokers. But time and time again, weather apps have been shown to ask for smartphone permissions that they don’t need and shouldn’t have.

Weatherbug app