Privacy

The short version

• No advertising, no advertising networks, and nothing is sold or shared with anyone.
• No third-party analytics service. No Google Analytics, no tracking pixels, no external fonts or scripts — every page loads only from this site.
• No accounts yet, so no name, email or password is collected.
• Your IP address is not stored in anything this site writes down — not in the usage log, not in the server's own technical log, not in the backups.
• You can see everything held about this browser, download it, or delete it, without asking anyone.
• You can turn measurement on or off below, and it takes effect immediately. In the EU, the EEA and the UK it is off unless you turn it on.

The cookie

One cookie, wxvid, holding a random string that means nothing outside this site. It expires a year after it is set, and it does two jobs:

• Remembering your things — the places you save and the dates you watch are attached to it. Without it the site would forget them the moment you closed the tab.
• Counting how the site is used — so we can tell whether people who arrive actually find what they came for.

Turning measurement off below stops the second job and leaves the first alone, so declining never costs you your saved places. If you decline before saving anything, no id is created at all.

In the EU, the EEA and the UK, the second job is off unless you switch it on. Nothing is counted and no id is created for reading — saving a place or watching a date still works, because that is something you asked for. Everywhere else, measurement is on until you turn it off. Which one applies is decided by the country your network provider reports, and you can change it below either way.

A second cookie, wxdnt, exists once you have made that choice — it holds a single character recording which way, and nothing else.

A third, wxmode, exists only if you switch the forecast discussion between plain language and forecaster language. It holds one of those two words, nothing else. It records nothing about you, so it is unaffected by the choice below — it is the same kind of thing as remembering you prefer Celsius.

Separately from cookies, two things are kept in your browser's own local storage. Neither ever leaves it — our server is not told and cannot read either — and clearing your browsing data removes both.

• theme — one word, if you switch the site between light and dark.
• changesSeen:… — one marker per place whose “what changed” list you have opened, so the badge can tell you what is new since last time. The coordinates of that place are part of the marker's name, which makes this the one place a location you looked at is written down at all. It is written down on your device, by your browser, and nowhere else.

What the usage log actually contains

One line per page view, with:

• the time, and the random id above;
• which kind of page — “a forecast page”, “a watch page” — not which place. A forecast for specific coordinates is recorded as /forecast and nothing more;
• the name of the site you arrived from, if any — reddit.com, not the full address of the page you were reading;
• when you save a place or watch a date, that you did so, along with the place name and the date you chose.

It deliberately does not contain your IP address, the full web address you came from, the coordinates or place names you searched for, or anything you typed.

Where measurement is off by default, there is no such line and no id — but the site does add one to a tally of pages served that day. That tally is a single number per day, with no id, no page and no time beyond the date, and it exists so we can tell whether anyone is reading from those countries at all.

Log files and that tally are kept for 25 months and then deleted.

Our web server keeps its own technical log of requests — which page, which result, how long it took. It records no address and no identifier: where a visitor's IP address would go, it writes a one-way code that changes every time the server restarts, so a burst of requests can be recognised as one source without anyone being able to work out whose. It does not record the coordinates you looked at or the link you were sent.

Places you save and dates you watch

These are the things you deliberately ask the site to remember, and they are kept against the id above:

• Saved places — the name and coordinates of each place, and when you last looked at it. Removed if you do not come back for 180 days.
• Watched dates — the place, the date, anything you chose to be alerted about, and the short label you typed, if you typed one. A watch is removed 90 days after its date has passed, whether or not you touch it.
• The share link for a watch is a random code. Anyone who has the link can see that watch, which is what makes it shareable — it is not tied to you and does not identify you.

You can see everything held against this browser, and download a copy, on what this browser has stored.

Other companies involved

• Cloudflare sits in front of this site as its network and, during the beta, its sign-in gate. Like any network provider it handles your requests, including your IP address, in order to deliver the page. It also tells our server which country a request came from, which is how the rule above is applied.
• DigitalOcean hosts the server the site runs on, in the United States, and takes periodic whole-server images as a disaster-recovery measure.
• Backblaze stores the nightly backup described below. It is encrypted before it leaves our server, so Backblaze holds a file it cannot read.
• Anthropic provides the language model that writes the forecast discussions, from numbers our server has already calculated. Nothing about you is sent with them — not your id, not your address, nothing that came from your browser.
• Weather data comes from Open-Meteo and the National Weather Service. Our server fetches it — your browser never contacts them, so they never see you.

All of them are in the United States, so if you are reading from elsewhere your request is handled there.

Backups, and what deleting does not reach

The site's data is copied to an encrypted nightly backup, kept on a thinning schedule that reaches back about a year. This matters for one honest reason: deleting something here does not reach the copies already made. If you clear this browser's id, it is gone from the live site immediately and stops being used for anything — but a backup taken last month still contains what was there last month, until it ages out on its own. Backups are only ever used to restore the site after a failure, and never to bring back something someone deleted.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can do all of this yourself, right now, without asking us or proving who you are:

• See what is held — everything, on what this browser has stored.
• Take a copy — the same information as a downloadable file, from that page.
• Delete it — “Forget this browser” below clears the id and detaches everything from it.
• Turn measurement off — below, effective immediately, and it never costs you your saved places.

It works this way because the id is stored so that scripts cannot read it, which means you cannot read it either — so we could not look you up from an email even if you asked us to, and a request form would be a promise we could not keep. Your browser proves who it is by simply being your browser.

If you are in the EU, the EEA or the UK you also have the right to object to or restrict what we do, to ask us to correct something, and to complain to your national data protection authority. The lawful basis is your consent for measurement — which is why it is off until you switch it on — and our legitimate interest in keeping the site running and secure for the rest.

Your choices

Measurement is currently on.

Who runs this, and when this changed

The Spread is operated by Jonathan Griffin, who decides what is collected and why — the “data controller”, if you are reading this against a checklist.

This notice was last changed on 2026-08-02. When it changes again, this date changes with it and the change is listed in the site's release notes; if a future change means collecting something materially new, it will be announced on the site before it starts rather than quietly appearing here.

Where this stands

The Spread is in a closed beta and is not a life-safety service. This notice describes the site as it is built today; if that changes, this page changes with it.Questions: hello@spreadwx.com.