The Weather Company, an IBM Business, (sometimes, “we” or “us”) is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy is important and we encourage you to carefully read it.
This Privacy Policy discloses how we collect, use and share information that we gather about you on the weather.com® website (the “Site”) and our software applications, mobile applications and other websites and services that reference or link to this Privacy Policy (together, the “Services”). This Privacy Policy also describes the choices you have regarding our use of and your ability to correct the information. The Services do not include websites, mobile applications or other services that link to another privacy policy.
- Our TRUSTe Certification
- How We Collect and Use Personal Data and Other Information
- Data Collection Technologies and Consumer Choice
- How We Share or Disclose Your Information
- Other Limitations on Privacy
- Opting-Out, Access, Corrections and Cancellations
- Minors’ Privacy and Submissions
- International Transfer
- Our Commitment to Security
- Changes to the Privacy Policy
Our TRUSTe Certification
The TRUSTe program covers only information that is collected through this Site and our mobile applications and does not cover information that may be collected through other software downloaded from the Site.
The Weather Company has received TRUSTe’s Privacy Seal signifying that this Privacy Policy and our practices have been reviewed for compliance with the TRUSTe program. In order to view our relationship with TRUSTe, please visit the validation page visible by clicking on the TRUSTe Seal. TRUSTe’s mission, as an independent third party, is to accelerate online trust among consumers and organizations globally through its leading privacy trustmark and innovative trust solutions. If you have questions or complaints regarding this Privacy Policy or practices, please contact us directly at https://feedback.weather.com (and follow the instructions on the page). If you are not satisfied with our response or your inquiry has not been satisfactorily addressed within five business days, you can contact TRUSTe here.
How We Collect and Use Personal Data and Other Information
In order to operate the Services, maximize your experience, and provide you with enhanced Services, we may collect and use information, some of which may be considered personal data. We collection information from and about you in the following ways:
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User Account Registration. When you choose to register a user account, you will be required to provide certain information about yourself. You may register using your e-mail address or your Facebook, Google+ or Amazon account. You may choose to add additional information to your account, including your first and last name, birthdate, gender, phone number, home address, work address, and television provider. If we can use this information, alone or in combination, to reasonably identify you as an individual, we treat the information as personal data.
We use personal data that you provide to give you personalized treatment on the Services; to operate the Services; to analyze, improve, enhance and fine tune our products and the Services; and for any other purpose that is permitted by applicable law and consistent with this Privacy Policy.
Information Provided By You. You may also choose to provide us with information, some of which may be personal data, when you interact with the Services in the following ways:
- Complete a survey—for example, you may choose to provide us an e-mail address so that we can contact you about your survey response;
- Register for a contest, sweepstakes or other promotion —for example, you may provide your telephone and home address and we may be legally obligated to disclose this information if you win;
- Send us an e-mail message or complete an inquiry form to receive additional information–for example, you might e-mail us with a question and we will use your e-mail address to respond to your inquiry;
- Submit a comment, leave feedback, allow us to access your calendar or send us a photo or video—for example, you might submit a cool photo of a weather event you experienced that we may post on the Services so others can enjoy it;
- Report weather or other conditions—for example, you might tell us that the weather in your area is cold or rainy and we may associate that information with your account;
- Submit information about yourself (e.g., your gender, age, age range, address, birthday, height, weight, body type)—for example, our OutSider mobile application allows you to track your fitness activities and allows us to deliver the OutSider mobile application features and services;
- Engage with interactive advertising—we receive the information you provide when you submit oral or written questions or comments via the interactive ads that are placed on the Services or on third-party platforms; and we may share this information with our Ad Partners; and
- Customize the Services—for example, you might set a “home” location so that every time you visit the Services, you are automatically displayed the weather for that home location.
Automatic Collection. We also collect certain information through automated means. Some of the information we collect through automated means may, whether alone or combined with other data, be personal data. For example, we automatically collect:
- Information about your device and device capabilities
- Information about your device operating system
- Information about your browser
- Information about how you use the Services
- Your activities on the Services
- IP address
- Advertising identifiers
- Mobile or Internet Carrier
- Browser type
- Browser identifier
- Referring URL
This information helps us to understand, analyze and measure how users use the Services; manage Services’ operations; deliver and measure the effectiveness of advertisements; help diagnose problems; recognize repeat visitors; and facilitate your access to and use of the Services.
Location Information. We also collect location information through the Services so that we can offer you certain location-based services (such as severe weather alerts through our mobile applications), provide advertisements that are relevant to your geographic location, and conduct analytics to improve the Services. The way in which we collect location information is different depending on whether you are accessing the Services through a website or a mobile application.
If you are accessing the Services through the Site, we use various technologies, including HTML5, to detect your location so that we can automatically show you the weather for your area, rather than some random location. Depending on browser type, your browser may inform you that the Site would like to collect your location and request your permission to do so. If you allow it, location information is then collected and may be stored locally on your device. If you decline the collection of location information, your location is not collected and you must manually enter your location.
If you are accessing the Services through one of our mobile applications, the way we collect location information will differ depending on your mobile device’s operating system. If you decline to allow location information collection, your location is not collected and you must type in a location or zip code to see the weather for that location or zip code.
In the event you allow location information collection through your mobile device, we may collect precise geographic location information. Whether we can collect precise location information is controlled by your device’s operating system. Our collection methods include GPS, cellular network location and other location-based services. Depending on your mobile device’s operating system, we typically receive the latitude and longitude of your mobile device, as well as date and time, but the precision of latitude and longitude varies greatly and is determined by various factors controlled by your device or mobile service provider.
If you opt to allow the Weather Channel or OutSider mobile applications to collect location information while the mobile applications are running in the background, you will enable continuous location collection. This allows us to send you severe weather alerts for the area in which you might be traveling and deliver you advertisements tailored to your current location. We also use this location information to conduct analytics and improve the Services. You can turn off location collection through your device settings or by deleting the Weather Channel or Outsider mobile application from your device. You also can turn off continuous location collection at any time through your device settings or by deleting the Weather Channel or Outsider mobile application.
Turning off location-based services in either The Weather Channel mobile application or OutSider mobile application also will disable certain other aspects of the Services, such as location-based severe alerts. However, you may still receive alerts for any location that you entered into one of our mobile applications.
We may share the location information we collect with third parties as addressed in Section 4, below.
Alerts and Notifications. Certain Services offer you the ability to receive push notifications for weather-related updates. To provide these Services, we may need to collect your e-mail address, phone number, device information, and mobile carrier information, in addition to the postal code or geographic area to which the alert, update or notification pertains. If you no longer wish to receive these types of notifications, you may opt-out by turning them off within the settings of your mobile device or the particular Service for which you registered.
Other Types of Information We Collect. Certain of our mobile applications interface with Session M. If you have an account with Session M and choose to log into Session M’s mPOINTS through one of our mobile applications to earn mPOINTS, Session M will provide us with your e-mail address. We do not use the e-mail address provided by Session M for any other purpose than to fulfill the Session M service.
In addition, older versions of the Services allowed users to view weather conditions for contacts saved on their mobile devices. If you agreed to use this feature, your contacts were accessed to provide weather information for your contacts that already have their address, city, state, or zip code available in your contact list. We did not store your contact list or use it for any other purpose other than providing weather conditions related to your contacts. You may disable this feature by updating your mobile application to the most recent version or deleting the application.
Special Note about Content Submissions. The Services may from time to time offer areas where you and other users can post or otherwise submit information, photos, videos, graphics, creative suggestions, ideas, notes, concepts, information, ratings or other materials on or to the Services (collectively, “Submissions”). Any geo-location, tags or other metadata in Submissions may become publicly available. Any information, including personal data, in your Submissions can be read, collected, or used by others. We are not responsible for the information, including personal data, included in your Submissions.
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Data Collection Technologies and Consumer Choice
Our Use of Cookies, Web Beacons, Single-pixel Gifs, and Information Saved by Other Technologies
We and third parties acting on our behalf use various technologies that help us to manage the operations of our Services and track usage behavior so that we can tailor information and advertisements to make your visits more enjoyable and meaningful. These data collection technologies include:
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Cookies: Cookies are text files containing small amounts of information that are downloaded to your computer or mobile device when you visit a website and stored within your browser. Cookies are then sent back to the originating website on each subsequent visit to that website or to another website that recognizes those cookies. Some cookies on our Services collect IP and Mac addresses, which may be considered personal data in some jurisdictions. Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognize a user’s device. If you have registered for a user account on the Site, these cookies may let us know who you are, may be necessary to access your account information, and may provide us and our service providers with information that we will use to personalize the Services in accordance with your preferences. You can find more information about cookies at www.allaboutcookies.org.
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Web beacons and GIFs: Certain pages on the Services contain web beacons (also known as web bugs, pixel tags and clear GIFs). A pixel tag is an electronic image, often a single pixel (1x1), which is ordinarily not visible to users and may be associated with cookies on users’ hard drives. A pixel tag allows us to understand which pages you visit on the Services and are used to help us optimize and tailor the Services for you and other future visitors to the website. Web beacons allow third parties to obtain information, such as the IP address of the computer that downloaded the page on which the web beacon appears, the URL of the page on which the web beacon appears, the time the page containing the web beacon was viewed, the type of browser used to view the page, and the information in cookies sent by the third party.
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Local Storage and Local Shared Objects: We use local shared objects (LSOs) such as Flash Cookies and local storage, such as HTML5 Local Storage, to enhance user experience by, for example, storing your user preferences and settings (e.g., volume/mute) in connection with animated content on the Services. Local storage is similar to browser cookies but can store data more complex than simple text. By itself, local storage cannot do anything to or with the data stored on your device. Like cookies, local storage can only access personal data that you have provided on the Services. Third parties with whom we partner to provide certain features on the Services or to display advertising based upon your web browsing activity also use Flash cookies or HTML5 to collect and store information. Various browsers may offer their own management tools for removing HTML5. To manage Flash cookies, please click here.
Information that we collect via the data collection technologies described in this section may be linked to other information about you and may be personal data. We use the technologies described in this section, alone or in combination, to provide, manage and administer the Services, understand user behavior, target and measure the effectiveness of advertisements, help diagnose problems, recognize repeat visitors, track and analyze usage behavior and, facilitate your access to and use of the Services.
Your browser, such as Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari, may allow you to manage your cookies and local storage. Because each browser is a little different, we encourage you to check your browsers’ “Help” feature to learn how to block cookies, how to receive notification of new cookies, and how to disable existing cookies. Please note, however, that without cookies you may not be able to take full advantage of all the Services and some parts of the Services may not function properly. For more information about cookies, please visit www.allaboutcookies.org/manage-cookies/.
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Use of Cookies, Web Beacons, and Other Technologies by Advertisers, Ad Networks, and Ad Servers
We adhere to the self-regulatory principles of the Digital Advertising Alliance (“DAA”). We work with a variety of advertisers, advertising networks, advertising servers, and analytics companies (“Ad Partners”) that use various technologies to collect data about your use of the Services (such as pages visited, ads viewed or clicked on) in order to send (or serve) relevant ads.
Ad Partners may place cookies, web beacons and/or other data collection technologies on the Services to (among other purposes): track how the Services are used, where users go and what they do after they leave the Services; link users’ devices; and serve more relevant ads on the Services or other websites that you visit. More information about this type of advertising is available from the Network Advertising Initiative's website at www.networkadvertising.org.
This Privacy Policy does not cover the practices of our Ad Partners. While we work with Ad Partners to improve user experience, we do not control Ad Partners’ technologies. For more information about our Ad Partners’ technologies and how they use the information collected by the technologies on the Services and your options not to accept cookies placed by some of Ad Partners on the Services, please visit the DAA’s opt-out page or the DAAC’s opt-out page.
In addition, you can find the links to the opt-out pages of our Ad Partners that may use data collection technologies on the Services here.
You may also opt-out of additional third-party advertising networks by going to the Network Advertising Initiative’s website at www.networkadvertising.org and following the directions.
The DAA offers AppChoices, a separate choice tool for users to exercise control over the collection and use of data through mobile applications for interest-based advertising and other related uses. To exercise choice for participating companies, you can install the DAA’s AppChoices application on your mobile device. Visit here for more information on DAA’s AppChoices tool.
The opt-outs described above are device- or browser-specific and may not work on all devices. If you choose to opt-out through any of our Ad Partners’ sites, you still may see advertisements but the advertisements will not be based on your interests.
You can also opt-out of future information collection from the Services by ceasing use of the Service or uninstalling the relevant mobile application.
Use of Cookies by Third Parties for Analytics
We contract with certain third parties that use data collection technologies to track, analyze and report data about the use of the Services and to analyze and optimize the performance of the Services. Information about these third parties is available here
Other Limitations on Privacy
We, our affiliates, or our Third-Party Processors may disclose your personal data without your permission (i) pursuant to judicial or other government subpoenas, warrants, or orders or otherwise to comply with law; (ii) where we believe the rights, property or an individual’s safety or security is at risk; (iii) if we find that your actions violate our Terms of Use or any of our other legal rights; or (iv) where otherwise required or permitted by applicable law (which may include a lawful access request by US or foreign courts, governments or law enforcement agencies).
Opting-Out, Access, Corrections and Cancellations
We will retain your information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide the Services. We will retain and use your information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements. If you have registered a user account with us, you may reset your password, update your personal data, correct information, delete your account or opt-out of certain Services, by accessing your account or you may contact us directly at feedback.weather.com (and follow the instructions on the page), subject to certain exceptions prescribed by law.
You may have the right to access, update, and correct inaccuracies in certain of your personal data in our custody and control, subject to certain exceptions prescribed by law. You may request to access, update and correct inaccuracies in personal data we have in our custody or control by writing to us at the contact information set out below. We may request certain personal information for the purposes of verifying the identity of the individual seeking access to his or her personal information records.
Minors’ Privacy and Submissions
We are committed to protecting the safety and privacy of young people using the Internet. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under age 13. We believe that children should get their parents’ or guardians’ consent before giving out any personal data. If you become aware that we have collected personal data from a child without parental consent, please notify us promptly at feedback.weather.com and follow the instructions on the page. If we become aware that a child under age 13 has provided us with personal data without parental consent, we will take steps to remove such personal data.
If you are a California resident under age 18 and are a registered user of any of the Services, then you may request that we remove any Submissions that you publicly posted on or in the Services. To request removal of a Submission, please send a detailed description of the specific Submission to feedback.weather.com and follow the instructions on the page. We reserve the right to request that you provide information that will enable us to confirm that the Submission that you want removed was created and posted by you.
We will make a good faith effort to delete or remove your Submission from public view as soon as reasonably practicable. Please note, however, that your request that we delete your Submission does not ensure complete or comprehensive removal of your Submission. Your Submission may remain on backup media, cached or otherwise retained by us for administrative or legal purposes or your Submission may remain publicly available if you or someone else has forwarded or re-posted your Submission on another website or service prior to its deletion. We may be required by law to not remove or allow removal of your Submission.
International Transfer
The Services are hosted on servers inside and outside the United States. If you are located in the European Union or elsewhere outside of the United States, information that we collect (including through cookies) will be processed and stored in the United States, a jurisdiction in which the data protection and privacy laws may not offer the same level of protection as those in the country where you reside or are a citizen. By using our Services and providing information to use, you consent to the transfer to and processing of information in the United States.
Our Commitment to Security
We have put in place physical, electronic and managerial procedures intended to protect your data. Of course, we cannot guarantee that your communications with the Services will never be unlawfully intercepted or that your personal data will never be unlawfully accessed by third parties. Any transmission of information is at your own risk.
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Changes to the Privacy Policy
We reserve the right to change our Privacy Policy as business needs require. If we decide to change our Privacy Policy, we will post those changes here prior to the time they take effect. If we make material changes to the way we use personal data, affected users who have provided us with an e-mail address will be notified via e-mail.
The Weather Company, LLCAttn: Customer Service Representative/Privacy Office300 Interstate North Pkwy SEAtlanta, GA 30339orFeedback.weather.com (and follow the instructions on the page)