Location and privacy

Location

Windshield Weather uses your location only when you ask it to start a drive from where you are, and to show your position on the map. It is read while you are using the app and never in the background, and the app never asks for “always” access. You can decline and type a starting place instead. Plan without your location shows how to turn it on or off.

The Location row in the account page’s Privacy step is marked PER DEVICE. Permission is controlled by each device’s system settings; Android has no Location page inside the app.

Your drives

Your saved drives — their places, departure and stops — and your display settings are stored with your account on our servers, so they appear on every device where you sign in. A drive that starts from where you are keeps that starting point. Forecasts are not stored with your account; the apps keep each drive’s last forecast on the device, for up to a day.

To forecast a drive, the route and the places along it are sent to the services that work out the route and the weather. Those answers are cached by the drive — its coordinates and departure hour — without your account attached, and are not served again after an hour, or six hours for a briefing.

Your drives shows how to delete drives, and Delete your account what deleting the account removes.

Analytics

Product analytics — which screens are opened and which features are used — is on by default. While it is on, the iPhone, iPad and Android apps and the web planner also record session replays of how you move through the screens. Text is hidden in them except weather readouts, so what you type and place, route, drive and account names never show. On phones and tablets the map and your route line do show; the web planner’s map is not recorded, and the Mac app records no replays. Analytics never includes where you drive or what you search for. On the website, visits from people who are not signed in are counted without cookies and without identifying anyone; we also record which links and buttons they click (not the text on them), where on the page they click, move the pointer and scroll, how fast pages load, and the country the visit comes from.

To turn it off, open your account page: in the app, Settings › Account › Update account settings, which opens it inside the app already signed in (in a sheet on iPhone, iPad and Mac, in a Chrome Custom Tab on Android); on the website, windshieldweather.com/account. Choose Privacy and switch off Analytics, then choose BACK TO THE APP if you came from the app. The choice is saved on your account, so it applies on every device where you are signed in. Turning it off stops everything sent to our analytics service about your account: app events, replays, and account activity such as signing in. Which features your account sees is still decided by our servers, using your account and email address. We do count that Analytics was turned off, without recording whose account it was.

Marketing email

Off unless you turn it on, in the same place: your account page › Privacy › Marketing emails. The emails we send otherwise are the ones you ask for: sign-in codes, reset links and email-change codes.

Crash reports

When the app crashes or something fails, a report is sent so it can be fixed. Reports leave out place names, coordinates, account details and anything you typed. While Analytics is on, a report also carries the identifier of your analytics session, so a crash can be matched to what happened before it. There is no switch for them.

Who else sees what

To do its job, Windshield Weather shares specific data with a few services: Mapbox for maps, search and routes; Xweather for forecasts at points along the route; Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and ElevenLabs to write and speak the briefing, without coordinates or your identity; and services for email, analytics, crash reports and hosting. We do not sell your data, and the app has no ads.

The Privacy Policy is the full account, and it is the version that governs. For privacy requests, write to [email protected].