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 download