If we want to stop location tracking, someone needs to get lots of location tracking for Washington DC and start correlating meetups between elected officials and K street lobbyists. That would focus attention on the problem.<p>Even if the location info is "anonymous", you can probably detect members of Congress from the movement pattern.
It's crazy the people download these ad-laden apps to simply get a weather forecast.<p><a href="https://mobile.weather.gov" rel="nofollow">https://mobile.weather.gov</a> is really nice lightweight website with no ads.
NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation like the BBC) and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute has made yr.no (webside [1], apps and open api [2]).<p>It's government owned so no data collection. I'm not sure how useful it is outside of Norway but I have used it successfully when visiting other countries in EU. I think it also worked in Mexico but I can't really remember.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.yr.no/?spr=eng" rel="nofollow">https://www.yr.no/?spr=eng</a><p>[2] <a href="https://hjelp.yr.no/hc/en-us/articles/360009342833-XML-weather-forecasts" rel="nofollow">https://hjelp.yr.no/hc/en-us/articles/360009342833-XML-weath...</a>
The default weather app on Apple iPhones is IBM's Weather Channel, <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207492" rel="nofollow">https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207492</a><p><i>> The weather data used in the Weather app comes from The Weather Channel. If you have issues getting accurate weather information, tap the icon in the lower-left corner to go directly to the weather source.</i><p>If you have an iPhone and are in the US, a home screen shortcut to mobile.weather.gov is much safer. Avoid putting the site in web browser new tab Favorites, which will be pinged by Safari even if you don't visit the site. This can be seen with Charles Proxy.
I think this is a little bit ironic. The city of LA just released an app called ShakeAlertLA, which works with the USGS early warning system to let you know when there's an earthquake in LA. The app TOS imply that your personal information is only used locally and not uploaded, but if you look at the app's source (to their credit, it's easily available), your location is continuously sent to an AWS server.
You can just type "current temperature" in google and it'll give you the weather forecast for the week. At least with google, they already have all your data.
The Daily has a good podcast episode where they go into more details with the reporters who wrote the NYT article: <a href="https://nyti.ms/2G7NcWH" rel="nofollow">https://nyti.ms/2G7NcWH</a>
Whatever you think of the problem of this location tracking, we still need to step back and take notice of the great hypocrisy of NYT on this kind of shit... e.g. “Project Feels” in which NYT predicts your emotional state while reading articles and attempts to sell ad inventory based on the ad’s connection to your emotional state.<p><a href="https://digiday.com/media/project-feels-usa-today-espn-new-york-times-targeting-ads-mood/" rel="nofollow">https://digiday.com/media/project-feels-usa-today-espn-new-y...</a>
> <i>An IBM spokesman, Saswato Das, said, “The Weather Company has always been transparent with use of location data; the disclosures are fully appropriate, and we will defend them vigorously.”</i><p>Why say something so stupid instead of issuing a simple “no comment”?
true weather is open source:<p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.conceptualspace.trueweather&pcampaignid=MKT-Other-global-all-co-prtnr-py-PartBadge-Mar2515-1" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.conceptual...</a><p>and love for those who still use desktops too:<p><a href="https://conceptualspace.net/trueweather/" rel="nofollow">https://conceptualspace.net/trueweather/</a>
The really ironic part in my view is that the native, Apple-made weather app on iOS used data from the Weather Channel. So there is literally no need to download the WC app. (To be clear, the complaint is centered around android and not the iOS app anyway.)