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by walterbell 2725 days ago
Do you have any references on the data provided by Apple to IBM, e.g. how can Apple provide live weather data for all possible locations without sending your location to IBM? Is the iPhone's IP address (which can be mapped to WiFi location) used to make the weather data request to IBM?
2 comments
matthewdgreen 2723 days ago
It would be reasonable to expect that as part of TWC’s contract with Apple, they’re contractually required to keep individual location data private. I wasn’t able to find any concrete evidence of this except for the TWC privacy policy for the Apple TV, which seems to explicitly differ from the normal TWC privacy policy in that it excludes the sale of individual-level data to advertisers. (If I’m reading this correctly.)

https://weather.com/en-US/appletv-privacy/

Standard TWC privacy policy for comparison:

https://weather.com/en-US/twc/privacy-policy#us-how-we-share...

I don’t think that Apple has any technical privacy measures in place here, but I would be deeply surprised if, after all their pro-privacy advertising, they allowed a default app to be (at the contractual level) a giant privacy risk for their customers.

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walterbell 2723 days ago
Good find. Wish there was a similar public privacy policy for Apple's Weather App, since phones share more data than TVs.
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floatingatoll 2725 days ago
Your top-level reply could be misinterpreted to say that Apple ships an app called "IBM Weather Channel" on phones.

They do not.

Apple ships an app "Weather", which currently uses api.weather.com as the data source.

IBM Weather Channel operates api.weather.com.

TLDR: You're both right: it's Apple Weather, and it requests from IBM directly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18822350

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