Are you sure that is 12.1MB of weather data, and not 40kB of json and 12.096 MB of ads and tracking data going back to them?
For example, a full month of hourly weather data for a single Canadian station is 131KB (pulling from the Climate Canada site), meaning that if you wanted an hours worth of data for the ENTIRE country you're looking at less than ~800kb.
But if you just limit it to a geographical subset, say the lower mainland of BC, or even just a single town, then you can eliminate pinpoint data about yourself. Knowing that a person is in Abbotsford is far less invasive than knowing that they went to the Shoppers Drug Mart at 8:46 PM after searching for cold medicine.
This isn't a black and white thing, I wish that I had more control over my iPhone. I would love to be able to tell it to report a general location (somewhere random within a 10km of my actual location) to some apps, and a precise location to others. I get that Wunderground has server bills to pay, and I'm not paying them, but I would imagine that there is still a viable ads based business model that doesn't get quite as invasive.
> I wish that I had more control over my iPhone. I would love to be able to tell it to report a general location (somewhere random within a 10km of my actual location) to some apps, and a precise location to others.
The iPhone (actually iOS) allows you to do exactly this. You can choose precise or general location on a per-app basis.
I use the built in weather app on my iPhone. I’ve never seen any ads in it, so I don’t know what “ads and tracking data” you’re referring to. The app does update on a minute-to-minute basis when it’s raining out, though. It looks like this [1] and it doesn’t just scroll left on a local timer. The magnitude of the predictions in the graph change on a minute to minute basis and can disappear entirely, giving a very nice prediction of when the rain will stop so that I can go out and expect not to get wet.
For example, a full month of hourly weather data for a single Canadian station is 131KB (pulling from the Climate Canada site), meaning that if you wanted an hours worth of data for the ENTIRE country you're looking at less than ~800kb.
But if you just limit it to a geographical subset, say the lower mainland of BC, or even just a single town, then you can eliminate pinpoint data about yourself. Knowing that a person is in Abbotsford is far less invasive than knowing that they went to the Shoppers Drug Mart at 8:46 PM after searching for cold medicine.
This isn't a black and white thing, I wish that I had more control over my iPhone. I would love to be able to tell it to report a general location (somewhere random within a 10km of my actual location) to some apps, and a precise location to others. I get that Wunderground has server bills to pay, and I'm not paying them, but I would imagine that there is still a viable ads based business model that doesn't get quite as invasive.