Privacy policy

The short version

• You never create an account, and we never ask for your name or email.
• Your quiz answers and climate preferences are saved in your own browser’s storage. They are not saved on our servers.
• To rank cities we send your preferences to our server, score them, and return the results. The preferences are discarded once the response is sent.
• There is no advertising, no ad network, and no cross-site tracking.
• Map tiles are the one thing your browser fetches from someone else. Everything else on the page comes from us.

What is stored on your device

ClimateSearch uses your browser’s localStorage, not cookies. Four things are kept there, all under keys beginning climatematch::

• your climate profile — the temperature, humidity, sunshine, rain and snow ranges you chose;
• your raw quiz answers, so returning to the quiz does not start from scratch;
• the list of cities you added to a comparison;
• the list of cities you saved.

On the climate compatibility page, a second person’s profile is stored the same way and on the same device, so that a couple can compare answers without either profile leaving the browser.

None of this is synced, backed up or readable by us. Clearing your browser data removes it, and so does this button:

What is sent to our server

Scoring runs on the server, because the climate dataset is far too large to send to your browser. So when you view results, your profile is sent to /api/rank — or to /api/right-now for the live-forecast mode — and the ranked cities come back. The profile is held in memory for the duration of that request and then discarded. It is not written to a database, a file, or a log.

Your profile contains climate preferences only: numbers, ranges and how much each one matters to you. There is no free-text field anywhere in the app, and nothing in a profile identifies you.

Our API routes are rate-limited to stop one client overwhelming the service. That works by counting recent requests against the IP address our host reports, held in memory for sixty seconds and then dropped. The count is not associated with your preferences or with anything else you do.

Share links

When you share your results, the link contains your climate profile encoded into the web address. That is what lets someone open your exact results without us storing anything. It also means that anyone who has the link can see the preferences you entered, and that the address may appear in the browser history and server logs of whoever you send it to. Share links are not secret; treat them as public.

Analytics

ClimateSearch currently sends no analytics anywhere. The code contains the ability to report anonymous product events — that a quiz was completed, that a city page was opened — but no analytics provider is connected, so nothing is transmitted.

If a provider is ever connected, those events will still carry only the interaction and coarse context such as a city name; never your preferences, and never an identifier for you. The app also respects your browser’s “Do Not Track” setting: with it enabled, no event is emitted at all. This page will be updated before any such provider goes live.

Other services

Open-Meteo. The “perfect weather right now” mode needs live forecasts, which we request from Open-Meteo. Those requests are made by our server, not by your browser, and contain only the latitude and longitude of candidate cities. Open-Meteo does not see your IP address and receives nothing about you.

The map. Map tiles come from OpenFreeMap, built from OpenStreetMap data. Unlike our other data, these are fetched by your browser rather than by our server, so OpenFreeMap receives your IP address and can see roughly which part of the world you are looking at. It requires no account and sets no cookies. We moved to it because a hosted basemap draws accurate coastlines, borders and place names that our own could not; the cost is this request, and we would rather say so than leave it unmentioned. If it is unreachable, the map falls back to an outline we host ourselves.

Fonts. The typeface is bundled with the site at build time and served from our own domain. Your browser makes no request to a font service.

Hosting. Like any website, our host records standard server logs — IP address, time, page requested, browser user agent — for security and reliability. We do not use those logs to build a profile of you.

What we never collect

No names, no email addresses, no passwords, no payment details, no contacts, no photos, no device identifiers, no advertising IDs. ClimateSearch does not ask for your location: the cities it ranks come from your stated preferences, not from where you are.

Your rights

Because we hold no personal data about you, there is nothing for us to hand over, correct or delete on request — the data lives on your device and you control it directly, including with the button above. If you believe we hold something about you regardless, write to us and we will look into it.

Children

ClimateSearch is a general-audience product and is not directed at children. Because we collect no personal information from anyone, we collect none from children either.

Changes

If what the app does with data changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top is updated. The commitments here describe how the software actually behaves, not an aspiration.

Contact

ClimateSearch is made by US Stormwatch. For anything on this page, email stormwatchcolin@gmail.com.