Weather (PFA)

Privacy Friendly Weather is an Android app that lets you watch the weather for cities and locations you are interested in.

The Privacy Friendly Weather-app provides the following features:

• The forecast of the current weather as well as a 5 day / 3 hour forecast. The weather data includes details such as temperature, a short description of the current weather condition and humidity.
• Locations can either be added permanently until they are removed or non-permanently which means that the location and its weather is forgotten when exiting the location's weather data. Furthermore, Privacy Friendly Weather provides a radius search. This makes it possible to find the locations around a chosen location which have the best weather conditions at the moment. The size of the search space can be set by the user. The unit of temperatures can be set to Celsius or Fahrenheit and the unit of distances to kilometers or miles.
• Weather data is provided by OpenWeatherMap which provides a free service. In comparison to paid API usages, the free API has a restriction to 60 calls per minute. API requests are processed via HTTPS and are encrypted.

The information OpenWeatherMap knows about users of Privacy Friendly Weather is displayed below:

The weather data is delivered by OpenWeatherMap. All requests are sent via HTTPS requests meaning that the request is encrypted. OpenWeatherMap will be able to process the request and will know the requested location. Furthermore, OpenWeatherMap knows to which app the request belongs to, because the app has to send an API-key to receive the data. This API-key is identical for all users of Privacy Friendly Weather if they did not provide a custom API-key.

Other pre-installed weather apps potentially offer the following problems:

• Pre-installed weather apps can be managed by the user in Android version 6 "Marshmallow" and above. This means that the app could send data into the Internet without the user’s knowledge from the first start.
• Some pre-installed weather apps can be uninstalled, but this is not always possible. In case the app cannot be uninstalled, it could be disabled instead. Although the app remains on the device it cannot be executed further on.

In the following points the Privacy Friendly Weather app differs from other similar weather apps:

• Minimal amount of permissions
• Privacy Friendly Weather uses the permission "Internet" to retrieve weather data. It further does not include any tracking mechanisms or advertisement. The two permissions for binding service jobs and keeping the phone awake are needed for background data management of the app.
• No advertisement
• Many other free apps in the Google Play Store dazzle annoying advertising which also shortens battery life.
• Radius Search
• Find locations around a chosen location which have the best weather conditions at the moment.