This Privacy Policy explains what personal data WX Alerts, Inc. ("WxAlerts," "we," "us," or "our"), a Florida not-for-profit corporation, collects through the WxAlerts website (wxalerts.org and its subdomains), our mobile and desktop applications, our APIs and MQTT feeds, and related services (together, the "Service"), why we collect it, who else sees it, how long we keep it, and what you can do about it. It is incorporated by reference into our Terms of Service.
The Short Version
- You can read the site and use the live map without an account and without giving us anything.
- We store one location reading per device: the latest one. Each new reading overwrites the last. We do not keep location history.
- No advertising, no ad trackers, no data brokers. We do not sell or rent personal data, and we never will.
- We use crash reports (Sentry) and a usage-analytics tool (Microsoft Clarity) to find bugs and confusing screens, never to advertise or profile. In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland we ask before Clarity runs; everywhere else you can switch it off under Privacy choices in the site footer or in the app's settings.
- An account needs an email address. Push alerts need a notification token. That is close to the whole list.
- You can delete your account and its data yourself, at any time, at wxalerts.org/delete or from inside the app.
- We are a nonprofit run by volunteers. Nobody here has a growth target that your data would feed.
The sections below are the binding version. Where the summary and the detail disagree, the detail governs.
1. Who We Are; What This Covers
WX Alerts, Inc. is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy. You can reach us at [email protected], or at [email protected] for anything that is not specifically a privacy question.
This policy covers the website, the apps for iOS, Android, macOS, Windows and Linux, our public API, and our MQTT feeds. It does not cover third-party services you reach from here, such as our Discord server, GitHub, an app store, or a payment processor's own checkout page, each of which applies its own privacy policy to what you do there. It also does not cover Home Assistant, MeshMonitor or any other software you run yourself against our feeds; that installation is yours, and its data stays on your hardware.
Features that are not live yet. Some parts of this policy describe things we have built toward but have not shipped. Those sections are marked, and they take effect only when the feature does. Nothing described as "not yet live" is collecting anything from you today. SMS text alerts are live and are described in Section 7.
2. What We Collect
2.1 If you just visit the website
No account, no sign-up, no tracking. Your browser requests pages and weather data, and our servers and CDN keep ordinary request logs (IP address, timestamp, the URL requested, user agent, and response status) which exist to keep the service running and to stop abuse. Alert, lightning and location-search requests you make to api.wxalerts.org appear in those logs too; a location search sends the text you typed (for example "Milton, FL") so the API can return matching places, and that query is not tied to an identity or kept beyond the log window in Section 10. When a search ends in a forecast, the API also counts which place it was, so the forecast page can suggest the places people look up most. It counts people rather than requests without storing who they are: each count carries an eight-byte code computed from your IP address, the date and a key only our server holds, which cannot be turned back into the address and changes every day. Each code counts once per place per day, and a place is only suggested once it has at least five of them in the past week, so a town looked up by one person on one day is never shown. The counts are deleted after 7 days.
2.2 If you create an account
Accounts are handled by our own identity server (Authentik), running on our own infrastructure, not by a third-party login provider. Creating one collects:
- Email address: your login and how we reach you about your account.
- Username and, if you provide one, a display name.
- A password, stored only as a salted hash. We never see or store your password itself.
- Sign-in metadata: timestamps, IP address, and device or browser identifiers for recent sessions, used to secure the account and let you spot access you do not recognize.
- Your acceptance of the Terms and the Life-Safety Disclaimer: the date, time and version.
If we later offer sign-in through an outside provider, that provider would share your name and email address with us to create the account, we would say so here first, and you would still be choosing to use it.
2.3 If you use the apps
The apps register a device record with us so alerts can reach it. That record holds:
- A push notification token issued by Firebase Cloud Messaging (Android, iOS, desktop). It addresses your app installation and nothing else: it is not a phone number and not an advertising ID.
- Your most recent location reading, and only that. See Section 3.
- Basic device context (platform, app version, and notification settings) so we can send the right payload and diagnose delivery failures.
- Saved places you create yourself: a label and coordinates for home, a school, a campsite, a venue. These are stored until you delete them, because a saved place is only useful if it persists.
- Alert delivery records, meaning which alert went to which device and when, kept briefly so we do not send you the same warning four times, and so a "the alert never arrived" report can actually be investigated.
Authentication tokens live in the operating system's secure storage on your own device (Keychain on Apple platforms, Keystore on Android, the platform secret store on desktop). They are not transmitted anywhere except to our identity server when refreshing your session.
2.4 If you donate
Donations are processed by Stripe. Your card number never touches our servers, because checkout happens on Stripe's own hosted page. What comes back to us and is stored in our donation ledger is: the amount, the currency, whether the gift was one-time or recurring, the tier it maps to, Stripe's identifiers for the payment and (for recurring gifts) the subscription, and the email address you gave at checkout, if you gave one. We keep that so a receipt can be reissued and a gift reconciled. Stripe's own handling of your payment details is governed by Stripe's privacy policy.
2.5 If you contact us or join the community
Email you send us, whether a bug report, an alert that arrived wrong or a rights request, is kept as long as needed to deal with it and to keep a record of what was decided. Our Discord server is operated by Discord Inc. under its own privacy policy; what you post there is visible to that server and is not covered by this policy except where we copy something out of it into a bug report.
2.6 If you hold an API or MQTT key
We store the key, the account it belongs to, its rate limits, and request counts and timestamps for it: the minimum needed to enforce limits and to contact you if your key starts behaving strangely. The public read-only MQTT feed requires no key and identifies nobody.
2.7 Crash reports, problem reports and usage analytics
These exist to find what is broken or confusing in the website and the apps, and for nothing else. None of it is used for advertising, for profiling you, or for deciding anything about you, and none of it is shared beyond the two providers named here.
- Crash reports (Sentry). When the website or an app hits an error, a report goes to Sentry: what failed, where in our code, the page or screen it happened on, your browser or device type and version, and the few steps leading up to it. We strip query strings from every address in a report before it leaves your device, so a map position or a search never travels with it, and we have turned off Sentry's collection of IP addresses, cookies and other personal identifiers. From the website, reports reach Sentry through a relay on our own domain that does not pass your IP address on at all. This runs for everyone, because a weather alert service that fails silently is a safety problem; the legal basis is in Section 6.
- Problem reports (Sentry). "Report a problem" in the site footer and in the apps sends what you type, the page or screen you were on, and, only if you add one, a screenshot and an email address for a reply. A screenshot shows whatever was on your screen, so look before you attach it.
- Usage analytics (Microsoft Clarity). Records how pages and screens are used: clicks and taps, scrolling, where people get stuck or tap repeatedly, and session replays, which are reconstructions of a visit so we can watch where it went wrong. Clarity masks text you type, we blank map positions, searches and sign-in or payment details out of the page addresses it records, and we mask the sign-in, account and spotter screens in the apps. We tell Clarity that advertising storage is refused, so it does not set Microsoft's advertising cookie. Clarity runs only with your consent where the law requires it, and you can turn it off anywhere (see below).
- A diagnostic ID. A random code, created on your device, that lets a crash report, a problem report and a Clarity session from the same browser or app installation be read together. It is not derived from anything about you, it is not an advertising ID, and it is created only once usage analytics are allowed. Turning analytics off deletes it.
Where we ask first. If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, Clarity and the diagnostic ID stay off until you agree. We decide whether to ask from the country your IP address is in at the time, using Cloudflare's network, because data protection law in those places applies by where you are, not by citizenship. Elsewhere they are on by default, unless your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal (Section 16), in which case they are off.
Changing your mind. On the website, Privacy choices in the site footer reopens the choice; in the apps it is a switch in Settings. Turning it off stops Clarity from that point and deletes the diagnostic ID. Crash reports continue, without the ID.
2.8 What we never collect
No advertising or attribution SDKs, no advertising identifiers, no fingerprinting, no third-party trackers or ad pixels. Session recording happens only through Clarity as described in Section 2.7. No contacts, microphone, calendar, health data, or files. The camera and your photo library are reached only where you choose to attach a photograph to a spotter report or a picture to your spotter profile, described in Sections 3.5 and 3.6; nothing is read from either at any other time, and the permission can stay off with the rest of the app working. No browsing history from outside our own service. We do not buy personal data, we do not enrich what you give us against outside datasets, and we do not track you across other companies' apps or sites, which is why the apps do not show Apple's App Tracking Transparency prompt.
3. Location: The Last-Reading-Only Rule
We store exactly one location reading per device: the most recent one. Every new reading overwrites the previous one. We do not build, retain or derive a location history, a movement trail, a track, or a pattern of where you go. There is no table to sell, subpoena or lose, because there is no table.
This is how the product is built, not a promise laid over a database that does otherwise. A weather warning is a polygon on a map, and the only question we need to answer is whether the point where you are right now falls inside it. Answering that needs one point. Answering it tomorrow needs tomorrow's point, not today's.
It is entirely optional. The apps ask for location permission and you can say no; the live map on the website never asks for your browser's location at all. Decline, and you can still use everything except location-based alerting. Set up a saved place instead and get alerts for that fixed point, which many people prefer.
3.1 Background location
The Android and iOS apps can ask for background ("all the time") location permission, because a tornado warning at 3 AM is exactly the case where the app is not open. This is a separate permission, asked separately, and declining it leaves the rest of the app working: you simply get alerts based on where you were when the app last ran, or on your saved places.
When granted, the app sends a coarse location heartbeat while it is closed. Fine-grained readings are taken only while the app is actually running in the foreground or while an active threat is being tracked near you. Every one of those readings, coarse or fine, follows the same rule: it replaces the stored one and nothing is appended. You can revoke the permission at any time in your device settings, and the apps do not degrade or nag if you do.
3.2 Saved places are different, and deliberately so
A saved place is a fixed point you typed in yourself: your house, a child's school, a field site. We keep those until you delete them, because that is the entire point of saving one. They are not derived from your device's location and they are not a history of your movements.
3.3 What we never do with location
We do not sell it, rent it, trade it, or share it with data brokers, advertisers, analytics companies or aggregators, not in identified form, not "anonymised," not in aggregate as a product. We do not use it to profile you or to advertise. The live map shows storms, not people, with one exception that only you can switch on: a certified spotter who chooses to appear on it (Section 3.4). Apart from that, we do not publish or expose any user's location to any other user.
3.4 Certified spotters who choose to be on the map
If you hold a current WxAlerts spotter certification, your spotter profile has a switch to show you on the public live map. It is off unless you turn it on. While it is on and the app has location permission, the app sends your position, and the map shows it rounded to about 100 metres, with a "last seen" time rounded to five minutes, your spotter handle, and your amateur callsign only if you chose to show it on your reports. Your name, email, phone number and account are never shown.
The same last-reading-only rule applies: we keep one position per spotter and overwrite it, never a trail. You disappear from the map 30 minutes after the last update, the stored position is deleted then, and turning the switch off deletes it at once. If your certification lapses or your profile is suspended, you stop appearing automatically.
3.5 Photographs attached to a report
A spotter report can carry a photograph, taken in the app or picked from your library, and it is sent only because you attached it. It travels as a separate upload after the report itself, so losing signal costs the picture rather than the report.
We read a deliberately narrow set of fields out of the file: when the camera says the picture was taken, the position the camera recorded and the accuracy it claimed for it, and the make and model of the device. Those exist so that a report can be checked against where and when you say you were. Everything else in the file's metadata is discarded when we re-encode the image, and the re-encoded copy is the one we keep.
Report photographs are not published on the live map and are not served to other users. Each one is held for review and becomes reachable only once it has been allowed through.
Before any photograph is published, it is automatically checked against industry child-safety standards for known child sexual abuse material. What happens if one is flagged is in Section 3.7.
3.6 Spotter profile pictures
A certified spotter can add a picture to their spotter profile. It is shown on your dot on the live map only if you turn on Show my picture, which is off unless you switch it on, and only while you are on the map under Section 3.4. Like a report photograph, it is re-encoded with its metadata discarded, checked against the same child-safety standards, and held for review before it is shown anywhere. You can remove it from your spotter profile at any time.
3.7 If an upload is flagged
If the check flags a report photograph or a profile picture, the upload is refused and the account is disabled while a member of our team reviews it, and we email you to say so. To meet U.S. law (18 U.S.C. 2258A), we then keep, for one year: the original file, the account details (email address, spotter handle, user ID, phone number and amateur callsign, where you gave them), and the IP address and time the upload came from. Only the people doing the review can reach that record.
If the review confirms the material, or it cannot be completed in time, we report it, together with those details, to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), which may pass it to law enforcement, and the account is closed. If the review finds it was flagged in error, your account, spotter profile and report are restored and we email you to say so.
4. Cookies and Local Storage
We set no advertising cookies of any kind. Most of what is stored is there to make the site work; the analytics entries further down are set only once usage analytics are allowed (Section 2.7), which is why visitors in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland see a consent dialog and nobody else is shown one. What is stored:
| Name | What it holds | Life |
|---|---|---|
wx_view | Where you left the map: latitude, longitude and zoom, rounded to about 11 meters. Carries nothing identifying. | 1 year |
wx_layers | Which map layers you had switched on. | 1 year |
| Session cookies / tokens | Keeping you signed in, if you have an account. Strictly necessary. | Session or until sign-out |
wx_consent | Your usage-analytics choice, so we do not ask again or override it. Set only when you make a choice. | 1 year |
wx-region (session storage) | The two-letter country code Cloudflare reports for your connection, so the site knows whether to ask (Section 2.7) without looking it up on every page. | Until you close the tab |
wx-diag-id (local storage) | The diagnostic ID in Section 2.7. Only with analytics allowed. | Until you turn analytics off or clear site data |
_clck, _clsk | Microsoft Clarity's own IDs, which group page views into one visit and one returning browser. Only with analytics allowed. | 1 year; 1 day |
Clearing your browser's cookies and site data removes all of them, and the map simply opens on wherever the most active weather is instead. The apps use your device's own preference storage for the same kind of settings, and its secure storage for sign-in tokens.
5. How We Use Your Data
Every use is one of these. There is not a further list held somewhere else.
- Sending you the alerts you asked for: matching warning polygons and lightning against your current location and saved places, and delivering the result by push, email or (when it exists) SMS.
- Running your account: signing you in, keeping your settings, answering your support email.
- Keeping the service up and honest: diagnosing failed or late deliveries, investigating your bug reports, finding abuse, enforcing rate limits, and stopping attacks.
- Finding and fixing problems: reading crash reports, problem reports and, where allowed, usage analytics, to find errors and the places people get stuck (Section 2.7).
- Processing donations: taking the payment, issuing the receipt, and keeping the accounting records a nonprofit is required to keep.
- Meeting legal obligations: tax and corporate records, responding to lawful process, and keeping and reporting child sexual abuse material as U.S. law requires (Section 3.7).
We do not use your data to train advertising models, to profile you, or to make automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you. Deciding that a warning polygon contains your location is arithmetic on a map, and it is the service you signed up for.
6. Legal Bases (GDPR/UK GDPR)
If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, we rely on these lawful bases:
| What | Basis |
|---|---|
| Account, saved places, push and email alert delivery | Contract, Art. 6(1)(b). It is the service you signed up for. |
| Device location, including background location | Consent, Art. 6(1)(a), given through the operating system permission prompt and withdrawable in device settings at any time. |
| Showing a certified spotter on the public live map | Consent, Art. 6(1)(a), given by turning on the switch in your spotter profile, and withdrawn by turning it off, which removes you at once. |
| SMS text alerts (when offered) | Consent, Art. 6(1)(a), given separately at opt-in. |
| Usage analytics (Microsoft Clarity) and the diagnostic ID | Consent, Art. 6(1)(a), given in the consent dialog on the website or the prompt in the app, and withdrawable at any time under Privacy choices or in the app's settings. Reading or writing the cookies and IDs on your device relies on the same consent. |
| Crash reports | Legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f), in finding and fixing failures in a public-safety service. We keep them free of IP addresses, cookies, query strings and any identifier unless you allowed analytics, and they set nothing on your device. |
| Problem reports you send | Legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f), in answering the report you chose to send us. |
| Security, abuse prevention, rate limiting, delivery diagnostics, server logs | Legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f), in keeping a public-safety service available and unabused. We have weighed this against your rights and keep the data minimal and short-lived. |
| Donation and accounting records | Legal obligation, Art. 6(1)(c), and contract for the gift itself. |
| Checking uploaded photographs and profile pictures for child sexual abuse material; keeping a flagged upload and its account details, and reporting a confirmed match to NCMEC | Legal obligation, Art. 6(1)(c), for keeping and reporting what U.S. law requires, and legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f), in keeping that material off a public service and protecting children. |
Withdrawing consent does not affect processing that already happened lawfully, and it does not delete your account. For that, see Section 11.
7. Push, Email and SMS
Push notifications are opt-in and are delivered through Firebase Cloud Messaging, which receives your push token and the alert payload in order to route it to your device. You choose which severity tiers you receive, and you can switch them off in the app or in your device settings at any time. Delivery depends on Firebase, your device and your network, and is not guaranteed.
Email alerts go to the address on your account or to any address you add. Every alert email carries an unsubscribe link, and you can change or remove the address in your settings.
SMS alerts go to a mobile number you enter on your own account and then confirm with a code we text to that handset. Nothing but that code is ever sent to an unconfirmed number. They are part of the paid plans, because each message costs us money to send. Specifically:
- You opt in affirmatively and separately, with a box that starts unchecked, not bundled into accepting the Terms, and we log that consent: the exact wording shown to you, its version, the date and time, and the IP address and browser it came from. That record is what a carrier audit asks for, and we keep it even after you opt out, so that the withdrawal is auditable too.
- Message frequency varies with the weather. You choose which saved places and which classes of alert are worth a text, so you control it. Message and data rates may apply.
- Reply STOP to any message to stop them, or HELP for help. STOP works instantly from the handset and needs no sign-in. You can also remove the number from your account page, which does the same thing.
- Your phone number goes to Twilio, our messaging provider, purely to deliver the message. We store the number itself, the last four digits for display, and a record of which alerts were sent to it.
- No mobile information or SMS opt-in consent data will be shared with any third party or affiliate for marketing or promotional purposes. It is used only to send you the alerts you asked for.
- Consent to SMS is not a condition of using WxAlerts. Every alert is free on the website, in the apps and over the API whether or not you ever give us a number.
Saved places. A saved place is a coordinate and a name you chose. It is what a warning polygon is matched against to decide whether to text you, so it is as sensitive as your address, and it is stored in a separate database schema from anything the public parts of our API can read. You can remove one at any time from your account page.
8. Who We Share Data With
We do not sell your personal data, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We have never done either and have no business model that would want to. The only outside parties that touch your data are the service providers that make the thing run, each under a contract that limits them to acting on our instructions:
| Provider | What it receives | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Google (Firebase Cloud Messaging) | Push token, alert payload | Delivering push notifications to your device |
| Stripe | Payment details, email if given | Processing donations; Stripe is the system of record for money |
| Cloudflare | IP address, request metadata | Serving, caching and protecting the site and API; telling the site which country your connection is in so it knows whether to ask about analytics; and relaying the website's crash reports and analytics to Sentry and Microsoft from our own addresses, without passing your IP address on |
| Functional Software, Inc. (Sentry) | Crash reports and problem reports as described in Section 2.7; the diagnostic ID if you allowed analytics | Finding and fixing errors in the website and apps |
| Microsoft (Clarity) | Clicks, taps, scrolling, session replays, device and browser type, and the diagnostic ID. Only with analytics allowed. From the website it travels through our own relay, so Microsoft does not receive your IP address; the apps send it to Microsoft directly | Finding where the website and apps are confusing or broken. We have refused advertising storage; Microsoft's own handling is governed by the Microsoft Privacy Statement |
| Twilio | Phone number, message text | Delivering SMS alerts and confirmation codes |
| HubSpot | Name, email address, organization and role from an inquiry form | Keeping track of organizations who have written to us, so a conversation is not lost between people. Only what the form asks for, and only when you send one; what you write in the message stays in our mailbox. |
| CARTO and the Iowa State Mesonet | Your IP address and the map tiles your browser requests | Basemap and NEXRAD radar imagery on the live map. They see tile requests, not your account. |
| Google Fonts | Your IP address when the page loads its typeface | Web typography. We are moving to self-hosted fonts to remove this request entirely. |
Our identity server, alert ingest, database and MQTT broker run on infrastructure we operate ourselves. Account credentials are not handed to an outside login provider.
NCMEC. One recipient is not a provider: if an uploaded image is confirmed as, or flagged and not cleared as, child sexual abuse material, we report it, with the account details and upload record described in Section 3.7, to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, as U.S. law (18 U.S.C. 2258A) requires. NCMEC may make that report available to law enforcement.
Beyond those providers, we disclose personal data only: (a) when you tell us to; (b) to comply with law, a valid subpoena or other lawful process, where we will give you notice unless legally barred from doing so (a report to NCMEC is covered by the paragraph above, not by this one); (c) to investigate or stop abuse, fraud, or a threat to someone's safety or to the integrity of the service; or (d) to a successor nonprofit or trustee if WX Alerts, Inc. ever merges, reorganizes or winds down, in which case this policy continues to govern the data until you are notified otherwise, and the successor cannot quietly repurpose it.
9. International Transfers
WX Alerts, Inc. is based in the United States and our infrastructure and providers are US-based. If you use the Service from the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, your personal data is transferred to and processed in the United States. Where we rely on providers for those transfers, we rely on the safeguards they offer. Several of our providers are certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and its UK Extension, and we otherwise rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses together with the technical measures described in Section 14. Write to [email protected] if you want the detail for a specific provider.
10. How Long We Keep Things
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Your last location reading | Until the next reading replaces it, or until you delete your account or revoke the permission |
| Your spotter map position, if you turned sharing on | Until the next update replaces it; deleted when you turn sharing off, or 30 minutes after the last update |
| Account, settings and saved places | While the account exists |
| Push tokens | While the installation is registered; removed when it is uninstalled, expires, or you delete the account |
| Alert delivery records | 90 days, for de-duplication and delivery investigations |
| Server, CDN and API request logs | 30 days, then deleted |
| Crash reports and problem reports (Sentry) | Up to 90 days, then deleted by Sentry; a problem report we are still working on may be copied into our own bug tracker until it is fixed |
| Clarity session replays and analytics | Replays 30 days; the aggregated heatmaps and counts they feed, up to 13 months |
| Forecast search counts (place and a daily code, no address) | 7 days, then deleted |
| Sign-in and security events | 90 days |
| Support and rights-request correspondence | 2 years after the matter is closed |
| Donation and accounting records | 7 years, as required for tax and nonprofit recordkeeping |
| A flagged upload, the account details and the upload's IP address and time (Section 3.7) | One year, as U.S. law requires; deleting the account does not end it sooner |
| Encrypted backups | 35 days on a rolling cycle, then overwritten |
Backups. When you delete something, it goes from our live systems immediately, but a copy can survive in an encrypted backup until that backup rotates out on the schedule above. Those backups are put beyond use: they are not queried, mined or restored to reinstate deleted data, and are touched only to recover from a failure. If a restore ever did resurrect deleted data, we re-apply the deletion.
11. Deleting Your Account and Data
You can delete your account and its associated personal data yourself, without asking anyone, in two places:
- In the app: Settings → Account → Delete Account, on every platform we ship.
- On the web: wxalerts.org/delete.
This is a real deletion, not a deactivation, a freeze or a hidden account that could be brought back. It removes your account, your saved places, your device registrations and push tokens, your stored last location, and your alert preferences. We act on it immediately and complete it across our systems within 30 days, with the backup rotation in Section 10 as the outer bound.
What survives, and why. Donation and accounting records are kept for the period in Section 10 because tax and nonprofit recordkeeping law requires it, but they are unlinked from your account. A flagged upload and its record (Section 3.7) are kept for the year U.S. law requires, even if the account is deleted. We may also retain the minimum necessary to comply with a legal obligation, to enforce a suspension for abuse, or to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim. Anything we keep for those reasons stays subject to this policy.
Deleting the app from your device is not the same as deleting your account: it stops push notifications, but the account still exists until you delete it. And you can always uninstall, revoke location permission, or turn off individual channels without deleting anything at all.
12. Your Rights and Choices
Wherever you live, you can ask us to: access a copy of the data we hold about you; correct anything wrong; delete it; export it in a portable format; restrict or object to a particular use; or withdraw consent you previously gave. We do not charge for this, and we will not treat you differently for asking. Most of it you can do yourself in your settings; for the rest, write to [email protected].
We answer within 30 days, and will tell you if a request is genuinely complex and needs longer. We may need to verify that the request comes from you, usually by confirming control of the account's email address, and we will ask for no more than is necessary to do that. An authorized agent may act for you with written proof.
If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, these are your rights under the GDPR and UK GDPR, and you also have the right to lodge a complaint with your national supervisory authority. We would appreciate the chance to put it right first.
If you are in the United States, several state privacy laws give comparable rights. As a nonprofit, WX Alerts, Inc. falls outside the scope of the California Consumer Privacy Act and most equivalent state statutes, which apply to for-profit businesses. We honor access, correction, deletion and portability requests anyway, from everyone, because the alternative would be to treat the law as the ceiling rather than the floor. For the record: we do not sell personal information, we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we do not process sensitive personal information for purposes beyond providing the service you asked for.
We have not appointed a representative in the EU or the UK under Article 27. Until we do, send anything you would send to a representative directly to [email protected], and we will handle it ourselves.
13. Children
The Service is a general-audience public-safety tool and is not directed to children. You must be at least 13 to use it, per Section 2 of the Terms, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. In a school, daycare, camp or club setting, the account holder is the responsible adult or the organization, never a child, and it is the adult's account, contact details and settings that we hold.
If we learn that we hold personal information from a child under 13, we delete it and close the account. If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child has given us something, write to [email protected] and we will deal with it promptly and confirm when it is done.
14. Security
Everything is served over TLS, and traffic between our own services is encrypted as well. Passwords are stored only as salted hashes. Access to production data is limited to the small number of volunteers who need it, over authenticated connections, and backups are encrypted at rest. We patch the stack we run and keep dependencies current.
The strongest control here is the one in Section 3: the safest data is the data that was never collected. A location history cannot be breached if it was never written down, and that is the main reason we do not write it down.
No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise. If you find a vulnerability, tell us at [email protected] before telling anyone else, and we will work with you in good faith.
15. Breach Notification
If a personal data breach occurs, we will notify the competent supervisory authority within 72 hours of becoming aware of it where the GDPR requires it, notify affected users without undue delay where the breach is likely to result in a high risk to them, and comply with applicable US state breach notification laws. Notice will say what happened, what data was involved, what we have done, and what you should do.
16. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control
We do not track you across other companies' sites or apps, for advertising or anything else. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we treat it as a no to usage analytics (Section 2.7) wherever you are, and the diagnostic ID is never created. Do Not Track has no agreed meaning and most browsers have retired it, so we do not act on it separately; Privacy choices in the site footer does the same job.
17. Weather Data Sources
Alert and weather data flows one way. We fetch public data from the National Weather Service, NOAA, GOES satellite feeds and other public sources, and we do not send your personal data, your location or your identity to any of them. Nobody upstream learns that you exist because you received a warning. WxAlerts is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or an official product of NOAA or the National Weather Service.
18. Changes to This Policy
We will update this policy when what we do changes, including when SMS or paid tiers go live. The current version always sits at wxalerts.org/privacy with the "Last updated" date at the top, and we keep the previous version available on request.
For material changes (a new category of data, a new purpose, a new class of recipient) we will give account holders at least 30 days' notice by email or in-app before it takes effect, and where the law requires consent for the change, we will ask for it rather than assume it. Continued use after the effective date means the updated policy applies.
19. Contact
WX Alerts, Inc.
A Florida not-for-profit corporation
Privacy: [email protected]
Support: [email protected]
Security reports: [email protected]
Legal notices: [email protected]
Privacy questions get a human, not a ticket queue. If something here reads as vague or as though it is hiding something, tell us. That is a bug in this page and we would rather fix it than have you assume the worst.