11–20 of 99 posts
I've never understood why Weather apps are such a huge thing. I just type into Google "Weather" and it tells me that weather. If I was worried about privacy I'd bookmark the local government weather website. Why the need to install an app for a simple query? People are obsessed with them though, they're massively popular so I'm missing something.
I use Weawow and Today Weather, none of them have access to Location, actually both of them have no permissions granted at all and works fine. I don't use apps which don't allow manually selecting Location.
I've never understood why Weather apps are such a huge thing. I just type into Google "Weather" and it tells me that weather. If I was worried about privacy I'd bookmark the local government weather website. Why the need to install an app for a simple query? People are obsessed with them though, they're massively popular so I'm missing something.
I use one because it is much easier to tap once than to have to type anything (like "weather").
The ideal privacy respecting weather app would download and update a local copy of every location's weather, and any requests you made would never leave your own device. I'm not sure how realistic that is, but as long you trust the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the government they operate under, and that the data being sent to OpenWeather is non-identifying or that they too can be trusted with your data, then this is probably the closest we're going to get.
Why not a web app instead? Web apps are nicely sandboxed, work on every device and give the user tons of interface features they are used to. Like zoom, copy&paste, bookmark urls (each city could be a url, parameters could be query string parameters) etc.
There are some privacy techniques the app could use that are hard for a web app. For example it could update the weather information at a fixed rate so it would not leak the usage patterns of the app.
I wonder how using an API that is under CC-BY-SA 4.0 [0] is considered an anti-feature. I mean, I understand what they want in f-droid with [1] but there should probably be some middle-ground for cases like this? [0] https://openweathermap.org/full-price#licenses [1] https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Anti-Features/#NonFreeNet
The fact that it had to be mentioned at all for a weather app is concerning & telling of the state of tech
The “telling state of tech” may be that our hardware has outpaced our ability to socially reason about how useful weather data should be collected and shared, or not shared.
The fact that it had to be mentioned at all for a weather app is concerning & telling of the state of tech
It's the same with fitness tracking apps, so many of them send health data to their servers, but there are a few (often paid ones, of course) that seem to store important data only locally.
Why not a web app instead? Web apps are nicely sandboxed, work on every device and give the user tons of interface features they are used to. Like zoom, copy&paste, bookmark urls (each city could be a url, parameters could be query string parameters) etc.