SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
[...] One of the most popular online weather services in the United States, the Weather Channel app has been downloaded more than 100 million times and has 45 million active users monthly.
The government said the Weather Company, the business behind the app, unfairly manipulated users into turning on location tracking by implying that the information would be used only to localize weather reports. Yet the company, which is owned by IBM, also used the data for unrelated commercial purposes, like targeted marketing and analysis for hedge funds, according to the lawsuit.
The city’s lawsuit cited an article last month in The New York Times that detailed a sprawling industry of companies that profit from continuously snooping on users’ precise whereabouts. The companies collect location data from smartphone apps to cater to advertisers, stores and investors seeking insights into consumer behavior.
[...] “If the price of getting a weather report is going to be the sacrifice of your most personal information about where you spend your time day and night,” said Michael N. Feuer, the Los Angeles city attorney, “you sure as heck ought to be told clearly in advance.”
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Interesting) by nwf on Friday January 04 2019, @09:45PM (2 children)
The Weather Channel, Accuweather and the like get information from NWS, but they add in other stuff. If you compare their forecasts, they are all somewhat different. If you want actual conditions, these services update much more frequently. WC is particularly good with that, but that's about it. NWS's data is rather hard to read at a glance and they don't seem to provide a custom forecast to a specific zip code, just the general area.
But I stopped using WC's app because it's just garbage. Slow, buggy, terrible UI. Accuweather's forecasts seem better, but their current conditions are off by like an hour.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @10:36PM
I might be wrong, but I believe the NWS only uses the US weather model whereas Accuweather and the Weather Channel also use the European weather model (and perhaps others) and base their forecasts on combining model outputs.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Joe Desertrat on Friday January 04 2019, @10:50PM
You're still far better off visiting your local news station's site and getting their weather reports rather than a national site like TWC or Accuweather. Even better if you look at the radar which most have on their website, it doesn't take much effort to learn enough to make an accurate forecast of your own, at least for the next few hours. I would avoid all the apps and just visit the website. Oh, and look out the window once in a while. Of course, if one is using a smart phone for all this they have sacrificed privacy anyway...