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Privacy

Thermograph is free, has no ads, and needs no account. It is built so that there is very little about you to collect in the first place.

Your location

Thermograph never looks up your location from your IP address. The only way the site learns where you are is if you press Use my location, which asks your browser for permission. You can decline, and picking a place on the map works just as well.

Whichever way you choose a place, the coordinates are sent to the server only as part of the ordinary request for that grid square's climate data. The place you picked is remembered in your own browser's local storage, not on the server, so clearing your browser data forgets it. The coordinates are never recorded in the usage statistics below — those record only how you picked a place (map, search, or your browser's location), never where.

Usage statistics

There is no third-party analytics service, no advertising tag, and nothing that follows you to other sites. What the site does keep is in two parts, and only the second one asks your permission.

Anonymous counts — always on

The server keeps simple counts of things like "the calendar was opened 40 times this hour" or "a search found nothing 12 times today", along with which site referred the visit (the domain only, never the full link). No identifier of any kind is attached, nothing is stored on your device, and there is no way to tell one visitor's counts from another's — so there is nothing here that could be traced back to you. These counts are kept for up to 400 days.

Session statistics — only if you say yes

To answer questions like "do people who open the location picker actually get a forecast, or give up half way?", the site has to see several actions as belonging to the same visit. That means putting a random identifier in your browser, so we ask first, and it stays off unless you agree.

If you agree:

You can change your mind at any time with the Analytics control at the bottom of every page. Turning it off deletes the identifier from your browser immediately and stops any further recording. Because the records are deliberately not linked to you, we cannot go back and find your past ones to delete — which is part of why they are kept for such a short time.

If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal, the site treats that as a no, does not ask, and records nothing extra.

Searches that found nothing

When you search for a place and the site finds no match, the text you typed may be kept so that missing places can be added. It is stored on its own, with nothing else about you attached, and only if it looks like a place name — anything containing an email address, a web address or a long run of digits is discarded rather than stored. Anything only one or two people ever searched for is deleted within a week; the rest is deleted after 90 days. Searches that did find a place are never stored as text.

Server logs

As on every website, the server records that a request happened — the page, the time and the result. Network addresses are shortened before they are written down, so an individual device cannot be picked out of the logs, and the logs are deleted after 30 days.

Email

If you sign up for the monthly digest, your address is used for that digest and nothing else. It is never sold or shared, and every message can unsubscribe you.

Accounts

An account is optional and only exists to hold weather alerts you have asked for. It stores your email address and the places you are watching. None of the usage statistics above are connected to it.

Questions: see About & methodology.

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