Privacy

GoCheckMyWeather has no accounts, no ad network, and no analytics or tracking script of any kind, on the web site or in the Android app built from it. This page states plainly what is stored, what is sent, and where, because "we respect your privacy" is not a policy, it is a slogan, and this one is meant to be checked rather than trusted.

What is stored on your device

Thirty names, all in your browser's own storage, and nothing else. Each is listed here by the name the site writes it under. Only one of them ever reaches a server we operate, and only if you turn on alerts, as described under Alert notifications below:

Your saved location: gcmw-loc, and your saved places: gcmw-places

If you type a ZIP code or city, or use "Use my location," the resulting coordinates and label are saved on your device so the board remembers it next time. It is not transmitted to us unless you turn on alerts for it; it is read locally each time the page loads and sent only to the federal endpoints listed below, so your weather can be fetched. The places you save to switch between are kept beside it, the same way.

The place you get alerts for: gcmw-push

Only if you turn on alert notifications: the place is also kept in the browser's own database, because the part of the site that shows a notification cannot read the rest of its storage. Turning alerts off deletes it.

The last reading for each saved place: gcmw-kept

When the board shows a place you saved, the card as it was shown is kept on your device: its temperature, condition, feels-like, the day's high and low, the line about what changes next, the eight tiles' values (rain chance, wind, humidity, dew point, pressure, visibility, UV, and sunset or the moon), the station, the time of that reading and whether alerts were in effect, and the water near it as the Water card showed it (the nearest river gauge's reading and forecast crest and the next tide), about a kilobyte and a half a place, so moving between your places shows the last reading at once, with its age, while the new one is fetched. Removing a place removes its reading.

The place the app's alerts and widget follow: gcmw-app-place

In the iOS app only: the place the app hands the site when it opens, kept so the Places list can say which place the app's alerts and home screen widget follow. The site never changes it; the app's own place sheet does.

Your theme choice: gcmw-theme

Light, dark, or automatic. Stored so the site does not flash the wrong theme on your next visit.

The last reading for your place: gcmw-last: with the address it came from, and gcmw-last-index

The answers the board was last built from (the Weather Service's forecast, latest observation and alerts for the place you chose, and the EPA's UV forecast for its ZIP) are kept on your device until newer ones replace them, so with no connection the board shows them with the time they were fetched instead of a blank page. At most sixteen are kept, the oldest dropped first. Radar and the forecaster's discussion are never kept. Other readings you view are kept only until you close the browser.

Today's record book for your place: gcmw-ctx: with the place and the day

The normal and record temperatures for today at your place, as the record book fetched them, kept on your device for that day so the card does not ask again.

This visit's answers: gcmw-cache: with the address they came from

Answers fetched during this visit, kept for the current tab only so a second look at the same thing does not ask again. They go when the tab closes.

Which GoCheckMy site sent you here: gcm-src

If you arrive from one of our sister sites, the link carries a short label naming the page you came from, and that label is kept for the current tab only. It lets us count how often the sites usefully hand readers to each other. It is a label we wrote, never anything you typed, never your location, and nothing that identifies you. It is discarded when you close the tab.

Choices you make on the page

Kept on your device: gcmw-map-light, whether you chose the light map; gcmw-sat-pick, the satellite view you chose, Off, Color or Infrared, on the home page's national map and on its Radar card, which keep it from one visit to the next; gcmw-gauges, whether you turned the river gauges on or off on the home page's Radar card and the Radar page's map, kept from one visit to the next, one choice for days when a river near you is at or forecast above action stage and one for days when none is; wx.boating.zone and wx.surfing.zone, the forecast zone you picked on Boating and Surfing; gcmw-getapp-dismissed, that you closed the suggestion to get the app. Kept for the current tab only: gcmw-water-near, the water near each place you looked at this visit (the nearest river gauge and the next tides, as the services answered), so the home page, the Water page and the Forecast page ask the services once a visit; gcmw-ag:, a prefix for three kinds of answer kept for the tab, the Weather Service's list of an office's river products, the text of one, and the name the Water Prediction Service gives a river gauge, so a river flood alert's link to its gauge asks each once a visit; gcmw-gl:, a prefix for the list of river gauges the Water Prediction Service gave for one place and distance, kept five minutes for the tab, so moving between the home page, the Radar page and the Rivers page asks for it once; gcmw-mk-card, gcmw-mk-home, gcmw-mk-local, gcmw-mk-radar and gcmw-mk-warned, the satellite and the layers you chose on the storm cards' maps and the Radar page's map, the layers you chose on the home page's two maps, and the satellite and layers you chose on the warned-area map shown during a warning; gcmw-hx-open and gcmw-hx-folds, the storm cards and the sections of them you opened; gcmw-heroPaused, that you paused the background animation; gcmw-in-twa, that the page is open inside the Android app.

The offline copy of the site: gcmw-shell- with a version

The site's own pages, code and pictures, kept by its service worker so the site opens with no connection. None of it is your weather or anything about you, and a new version of the site replaces it.

The iPhone app sets two more in its own window, gcmw-in-ios and gcmw-app-theme, so the page knows it is inside the app and which theme the app is in; the site reads them and never writes them.

One thing is asked for and not kept, the city your connection appears to come from. On a first visit, before you have set a location, the board asks our shared service which city your request appears to come from, so it can show you real weather instead of a national map. Every web request carries a network address; the service reads that address at the edge, answers with a city and a pair of coordinates rounded to about a kilometer, and stores and logs nothing: not the address, not the city, not that the request happened. It is not your device's location, it cannot raise a location prompt, and it is often the nearest large city rather than your town. The board labels it as a guess and asks you for your real place. It is never written to your device, it never joins your saved places, and it is not asked for again once you have set a place.

Clearing your browser's site data for gocheckmyweather.com removes all thirty. There is no account to delete, because there is no account.

What is never collected

There is no analytics package, no advertising SDK, no third-party tracking pixel, and no fingerprinting of any kind, anywhere in this site or in the Android app. We do not know how many people use this site, what they look at, or who they are, and we have made no attempt to build that capability.

Where your requests go

This site fetches live data directly from official public sources in your browser. Your device contacts these systems when you use the corresponding feature; we do not proxy, log, or see these requests:

• api.weather.gov, forecast.weather.gov, mapservices.weather.noaa.gov: the National Weather Service, for forecasts, alerts, and radar imagery.
• mesonet.agron.iastate.edu: the Iowa Environmental Mesonet at Iowa State University, for the radar pictures and the loop's frames. This is the one source here that is a university rather than a federal agency, and the data in it is the National Weather Service's own NEXRAD composite. Your browser asks it for map tiles, for the list of times those tiles exist for, and, for the radar on the home page, for pictures of a box about 125 miles from top to bottom, centered on your place, so those requests say roughly where you are, the way any map request does. Nothing else about you is sent.
• www.spc.noaa.gov: the Storm Prediction Center, for the severe weather outlook.
• www.nhc.noaa.gov: the National Hurricane Center, for tropical products.
• gibs.earthdata.nasa.gov: NASA's Global Imagery Browse Services, for the NOAA GOES satellite image on two maps and one view: the home page's map of the storms around the United States, where it shows until you turn it off; the Hurricane Center's storm maps, only after you turn it on; and a storm's Storm view, only after you open it, whose moving images load only when you press Play. Your browser asks it for the map tiles in view, the Storm view's image of the storm's own box, one a frame, whether an image exists for a given time, and the infrared color table. The tiles and the box say which part of the map or which storm is in view, not where you are; whether the image is the daytime or the night one is worked out on your device; and no cookie is sent.
• coast.noaa.gov: NOAA's Historical Hurricane Tracks service, for the list of past storms that have passed near a location. Your coordinates are sent so it can answer which storms came near them.
• api.water.noaa.gov, water.noaa.gov, gauge-product.gocheckmybrands.workers.dev: river and flood forecasts. The last host is the one exception to the line above: a small service we run, which reads a river gauge's record from the National Water Prediction Service and sends your browser only the few lines a page shows, so a page does not have to download the whole record. Your browser asks it for a gauge by its code, such as CHTS1 (and, for a gauge's recent readings, how many hours of them), and sends nothing else; it keeps nothing about who asked, and sets no cookie. If it cannot answer, your browser asks the National Water Prediction Service directly.
• api.tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov, tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov, www.ndbc.noaa.gov: tides, currents, and buoy observations.
• tigerweb.geo.census.gov: the Census Bureau's geocoder, to turn a typed ZIP or city into coordinates.
• data.epa.gov: the Environmental Protection Agency's hourly UV forecast, asked for by the ZIP your place falls in.
• archive-api.open-meteo.com, open-meteo.com: the historical archive behind the record book comparison.
• gocheckmy-api.netlify.app: a shared service we operate for the GoCheckMy family of sites, used here for air quality, for the day's normals and records, for the geocoder fallback, and on a first visit for the coarse city described above. It performs the lookup and returns the result; it does not store your location.

If you use your device's location through "Use my location," those coordinates go only to the federal endpoints above, to fetch weather for that point. We do not receive them, unless you turn on alerts for that place.

Google Fonts used to be on that list, and is not any more. The typefaces are served from this site, so loading a page no longer tells Google that you opened it. Nothing else about how the pages look has changed: they are the same files Google was serving, hosted here instead.

Alert notifications

If you turn on alerts on the Alerts page, in a browser or in the Android app, your browser asks its own push service (Google's for Chrome and the Android app, Mozilla's for Firefox, Apple's for Safari) for a notification address, and the site sends two things to a server we operate on Cloudflare at gocheckmyweather-push.gocheckmybrands.workers.dev: that address, and the coordinates of the place. The server converts the coordinates once into National Weather Service zone codes and keeps the zones, the place's name as the Weather Service gives it (such as "Charleston, SC"), and the address; it does not keep the coordinates. When the Weather Service issues an alert for one of those zones, the server asks the push service to wake your device. The notification it sends carries no content: your device then fetches the alert from api.weather.gov itself. The server also keeps a record of which alerts it has woken your device for, so you never get the same one twice, and deletes that record after sixty days.

Turning alerts off deletes the address, the zones, the place and that record at once. If you clear this site's data or uninstall the app, the push service retires the address, and the server deletes everything under it the first time it is told the address is gone. The server never learns who you are.

The Android app

The GoCheckMyWeather app is this web site, presented full screen with no browser address bar. It asks for two permissions, each only when you use the feature that needs it: your location, when you choose "Use my location," and notifications, when you turn on alerts. Neither is required to use the app. It contains no advertising SDK and no analytics SDK. Everything on this page applies to it without exception.

The iOS app

The iOS app is this site inside an app, plus three things a browser tab cannot do: alert notifications, a home screen widget, and a place you choose once for both. Choosing a place stores its coordinates and label on your phone, shared with the widget and nothing else. The widget fetches conditions and alerts from api.weather.gov directly, the same way the site does.

If you turn on alert notifications, the app sends two things to a server we operate on Cloudflare at gocheckmyweather-push.gocheckmybrands.workers.dev: the coordinates of the place you chose, which the server converts once into National Weather Service zone codes, and the notification address Apple issues to this app on your phone (a device token). The server keeps the zone codes, the place's name as the Weather Service gives it, and the token so it can send you a notification when the National Weather Service issues an alert for those zones, plus a record of which alerts it has already sent to your phone so you never receive the same one twice, deleted after sixty days. It stores nothing else and never learns who you are. From version 1.1 the app also gives that server two more tokens, which Apple issues on your phone, and gives them to nothing else: a push-to-start token (iOS 17.2 and later), which lets the server start a warning card on your Lock Screen for an Extreme or Severe Warning, and an update token for each card, which lets the server update and end that card; turning alerts off removes them. Turning alerts off removes your token, zones, place and that record from the server; deleting the app does the same as soon as Apple reports the token gone. The app contains no advertising SDK and no analytics SDK, and it requests the device location permission only when you choose "Use my location."

Children's privacy

This site is a general audience reference tool with no accounts, no user-generated content, and no mechanism to collect personal information from anyone, including children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.

Changes to this page

If what this site collects or contacts ever changes, this page will be updated to say so before that change ships. There is no reason for it to grow: the site's whole design is that it does not need your data to work.

Contact

Questions about this policy can be sent to desk@gocheckmyweather.com. GoCheckMyWeather is operated by Go Check My Brands LLC, part of the GoCheckMy family of sites.