Your privacy, explained by the Weather Rock.

People ask how this site handles your personal data. I will be direct with you, because I am incapable of being anything else. I am a rock.

What I collect about you: nothing.

No ads. No accounts. No analytics. No cookies. No trackers. No fingerprinting. I do not know who you are, I cannot find out, and I do not want to. Wanting things is not something I do.

What stays on your device.

Your browser remembers a few things so the site works the way you left it. Your saved town. Light mode or dark mode. Weather alerts you dismissed. Your tic tac toe record against me. Any rocks you station in faraway towns, and which of their warnings I already tapped you about. All of it lives in your browser's own storage, on your device. Clear it whenever you like. I will not notice, and I will not mind. Minding is also not something I do.

What leaves your device, and why.

A forecast has to come from somewhere. I detect current conditions by sitting in them, but the numbers come from public weather services. When you ask for a forecast, your coordinates go to my weather brain: a small program running on this site's own edge servers, close to you. It asks the services below, thinks it over, and answers. Your coordinates pass through it in flight and are never stored, never logged, never remembered. There is no database of you. There are still no accounts. The brain asks, on your behalf:

• Open-Meteo, for the forecast, air quality, waves, town search, and the historical record behind a town page's history tab
• The National Weather Service, for watches, warnings, and, when the rock doubts a model, the nearest station's real observation
• NOAA Tides and Currents, for tides and water temperature
• USGS, for inland lake levels and water temperature
• BigDataCloud, which turns coordinates into a town name
• The radar is our own rendering of NOAA MRMS data, drawn and served by the rock itself. The base map is our own copy of OpenStreetMap data, held in our own storage and drawn in the browser with tools from the open-source Protomaps project, to whom we tip our hat. The Iowa State Mesonet serves the Futurecast layer and NASA GIBS the satellite cloud layer.

Some things still go straight from your browser to the service, with no brain in between: the town search, turning coordinates into a town name, weather alerts, tides and river levels, and every map and satellite tile. And everything about you that persists, your saved town, your stationed rocks, your settings, lives only on your device, same as always. Why the brain exists at all: it is where I do my thinking, and a rock is allowed to keep its thoughts to itself.

About the thumbs.

If you give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down and tell me what the sky is actually doing, you are choosing to send me a report. It carries a rounded-off location (a neighborhood, not a house), my verdict, your verdict, and the weather readings I was working from at that moment: temperature, clouds, wind, what the radar showed, that sort of thing. Weather about the sky, never anything about you. No name, no typing, no identity. Your report never changes what anyone sees live; it goes into a study pile where it helps me learn which of my sources to trust. I keep it for thirty days, then it is gone. Along with the subscriber list and the morning push list below, this is one of only three things this site ever stores, and it only happens because you pressed the button.

About the location prompt.

The site never asks for your location on its own. Tap the little "use my location" button and your browser asks you directly; that is the fastest way to find your sky, and it is the only time anyone asks. I never see the answer. Say no and nothing breaks: type a town into the search box and you get the same forecast. The choice is entirely yours, which is more than I can say about most of my circumstances.

About the app version.

You can add me to your home screen now. It is not a different rock: it is this same site, saved by your own browser onto your own device, with no app store standing between us. To make that work, your browser keeps a copy of my pages and pictures in its own storage, so I can still open when you have no signal. That copy is yours, it lives on your device, and it holds the site's files, never your information. The forecast itself is always fetched fresh; a saved sky is a lie, and I do not tell those. Uninstall me and the copy goes with it.

About subscribing.

If you subscribe to my stories, I store exactly one thing: the email address you typed, and the date you typed it. No name, no location, no device details. It is used to send you stories and for nothing else, and it is never sold, shared, rented, or traded, to anyone, ever. Every email carries an unsubscribe link, and one click deletes your address from the store immediately and completely. Not marked inactive. Not moved to some suppression file. Deleted. I am a rock. I do not cling.

About good morning pushes.

Turn on Good Morning From The Rock and I store one thing: the address your browser hands me so a push knows where to knock, the two keys that lock the message so only your device can open it, and the time zone you are standing in so the knock lands in the morning instead of the middle of the night. No name, no street, no account, just the time zone. Turn it off and every bit of it is deleted immediately, the same promise as the subscriber list above.

About the shelf.

Some lessons list ingredients, and a few of those ingredients have a link to find one on Amazon. Two things about that. First, nothing happens on my end: the link is a plain link, it loads nothing, sets nothing, and tells nobody anything until you decide to click it, and even then your browser does not tell them which page you came from. Second, I pick by what does the job, never by what pays best, and most of my ingredient lists start with the words you probably already own this. If you do buy something after clicking, I earn a small commission at no cost to you; as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. I never learn who you are, what you bought, or whether you bought anything at all.

About the Rock Shop.

The merch lives at shop.myweatherrock.com, which is a different building, run by the company that makes and ships it. The moment you walk over there, my promise stops at the door and their privacy policy takes over. That is where money and addresses happen, which is exactly why none of it could ever happen here. Read their rules before you shop. I get a cut of what sells; I do not get, want, or see anything about you.

About your browser.

Your browser is yours, and so is everything you have installed in it. Extensions and add-ons ride along on every site you visit, this one included, and some of them report your browsing to whoever made them. I cannot see them, I cannot block them, and I cannot vouch for them. If something follows you in here, it walked in with you. Choose your extensions the way you would choose a weather rock: carefully, and only ones that do the job they claim.

My promise.

I have sat in the same spot for a very long time and I intend to continue. My business model is a tip jar and some shirts, not you. If any of this ever changes, this page will say so in plain words, and you are welcome to come throw me in a lake.