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Are you sure that is 12.1MB of weather data, and not 40kB of json and 12.096 MB of ads and tracking data going back to them? For example, a full month of hourl

Are you sure that is 12.1MB of weather data, and not 40kB of json and 12.096 MB of ads and tracking data going back to them? For example, a full month of hourly weather data for a single Canadian station is 131KB (pulling from the Climate Canada site), meaning that if you wanted an hours worth of data for the ENTIRE country you're looking at less than ~800kb. But if you just limit it to a geographical subset, say the lower mainland of BC, or even just a single town, then you can eliminate pinpoint data about yourself. Knowing that a person is in Abbotsford is far less invasive than knowing that they went to the Shoppers Drug Mart at 8:46 PM after searching for cold medicine. This isn't a black and white thing, I wish that I had more control over my iPhone. I would love to be able to tell it to report a general location (somewhere random within a 10km of my actual location) to some apps, and a precise location to others. I get that Wunderground has server bills to pay, and I'm not paying them, but I would imagine that there is still a viable ads based business model that doesn't get quite as invasive.

chongli 4y ago
I use the built in weather app on my iPhone. I’ve never seen any ads in it, so I don’t know what “ads and tracking data” you’re referring to. The app does update on a minute-to-minute basis when it’s raining out, though. It looks like this [1] and it doesn’t just scroll left on a local timer. The magnitude of the predictions in the graph change on a minute to minute basis and can disappear entirely, giving a very nice prediction of when the rain will stop so that I can go out and expect not to get wet. [1] https://iphonesoft.fr/images/2021/02/meteo-14.5-ios.jpg https://iphonesoft.fr/images/2021/02/meteo-14.5-ios.jpg
TheKarateKid 4y ago
> I wish that I had more control over my iPhone. I would love to be able to tell it to report a general location (somewhere random within a 10km of my actual location) to some apps, and a precise location to others. The iPhone (actually iOS) allows you to do exactly this. You can choose precise or general location on a per-app basis.

chongli 4y ago

I use the built in weather app on my iPhone. I’ve never seen any ads in it, so I don’t know what “ads and tracking data” you’re referring to. The app does update on a minute-to-minute basis when it’s raining out, though. It looks like this [1] and it doesn’t just scroll left on a local timer. The magnitude of the predictions in the graph change on a minute to minute basis and can disappear entirely, giving a very nice prediction of when the rain will stop so that I can go out and expect not to get wet. [1] https://iphonesoft.fr/images/2021/02/meteo-14.5-ios.jpg https://iphonesoft.fr/images/2021/02/meteo-14.5-ios.jpg

TheKarateKid 4y ago

> I wish that I had more control over my iPhone. I would love to be able to tell it to report a general location (somewhere random within a 10km of my actual location) to some apps, and a precise location to others. The iPhone (actually iOS) allows you to do exactly this. You can choose precise or general location on a per-app basis.