This policy covers the Recon Weather app and reconwx.org, operated by Recon Weather. It describes what the app collects, why, and what we do not do. It applies only to Recon Weather; other services run by Recon Weather have their own policies.
The short version. We collect the least we can get away with. Your location is used to send you warnings and is not sold, shared or handed to advertisers. There are no ad networks and no data brokers in this app. You can use most of it without an account at all.
Radar, satellite, warnings, outlooks and notifications all work without signing in. An account is only needed to send storm reports, talk in chat, and sync your saved places, color tables and settings between devices.
Location is the core of the app and you control it in iOS Settings at any time.
To match a warning to you, a coarse position is held on our server and replaced each time it updates. We keep the most recent position, not a history of everywhere you have been.
Denying or revoking location does not break the app. You lose warnings for where you are, and you can still add saved places by name.
If you are a chaser and switch on Beacon my location, your position is published on the public map while it is on, along with readings from any instrument attached to you. That is the point of it. Switch it off and you come off the map immediately, on every tier - we do not keep showing you from a truck's telemetry or an account device fix.
Positions recorded while the beacon was on are kept as a track so a chase day can be reviewed afterwards. Positions recorded while it was off stay private for ever, whatever you change later. Tracks for a day nobody shared are deleted; a day somebody did share is archived.
If you are carrying one of our wind probes, its readings - wind, gusts, temperature, pressure, battery, and the unit's own GPS - are published with your marker while you are beaconing.
If you have no probe, the app may read your phone's barometer and send the pressure with your beacon, so a pressure trace exists for that vehicle. It is sent only while the beacon is on, it needs Motion & Fitness permission, and you can refuse it without affecting anything else.
A report is meant to be seen: the photo or clip, the time, and your display name go on the public map. Your exact position is not published. Reports are placed approximately, and where you were standing stays with us.
Camera and photo library access are used only when you attach something to a report or save a map screenshot.
Chat is public to anyone who opens the room, and you need an account to post. Messages are retained so the room has history, and are passed through automatic filtering and human moderation. You can report a message and block a user. Moderators can see who sent what.
An account is an email address, a display name, and a password. We store the password only as a salted, peppered scrypt hash - we cannot read it, and a copy of our database alone is not enough to sign in as you. Your email address is also stored as a one-way hash so a ban survives an account being deleted without us keeping the address itself.
Delete your account from inside the app and we remove the profile and sign out every device. Content you already posted publicly may remain.
Push needs a device token from Apple, which we store with the alert types you chose and a coarse area to match against. Turning notifications off in iOS stops them; deleting the app removes the token on our next failed send.
Servers keep ordinary request logs - address, time, path, user agent - for a short period, for debugging and abuse. The app reports crash and diagnostic breadcrumbs so we can find faults. We do not use third-party analytics SDKs, and nothing in the app tracks you across other companies' apps or websites.
We use Apple for push notifications and sign-in, Mapbox to render maps, Cloudflare in front of our servers, DigitalOcean to host them, and an email provider to send sign-in codes. Each sees only what it needs to do that job. Weather data comes from public agencies - NOAA, the National Weather Service, the Storm Prediction Center, the National Hurricane Center and Environment and Climate Change Canada - and we send them nothing about you.
Recon Weather is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child has given us data, write to us and we will remove it.
Ask us what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted, at [email protected]. If you have an account, deleting it from inside the app does most of this immediately.
If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will say so in the app. The date at the top is when it last changed.
Recon Weather · [email protected] · reconwx.org · Terms · Support