1. Introduction

Welcome to WeatherZine, operator of the Live Weather Dashboard. We are deeply committed to safeguarding your privacy and ensuring that your personal data is protected. This Privacy Policy is designed to inform you about the types of information we collect, how it is used, and the steps we take to keep it secure. By using our website and our weather forecasting services, you consent to the practices described in this document.

2. Data Collection and Usage

A. Location Data Usage

Our defining feature is the delivery of hyper-local, real-time weather data. To accomplish this, we utilize two methods to determine your location:

Manual Search: When you type a city, state, or ZIP code into our search bar, we send that query securely via an API to determine its latitude and longitude.
Auto-Detect (GPS/IP): If you click the "Auto-detect location" button, your browser will prompt you for permission to access your device's Geolocation API. If granted, your exact coordinates are temporarily accessed to fetch the relevant 7-day forecast and populate the interactive map layers.

IMPORTANT: We do NOT permanently store your GPS coordinates on our servers. Your location data is processed locally and stored in your browser's local storage (so you don't have to re-enter it during your next visit), but it is not linked to any identifiable account on our backend.

B. APIs and Third-Party Data Handling

WeatherZine acts as a proxy to retrieve meteorological data. When you request a weather update, we transmit your location coordinates anonymously to third-party weather API providers (such as Open-Meteo or OpenWeatherMap). These third parties provide the temperature, precipitation, wind speed, and other atmospheric metrics return payloads. They do not receive any personally identifiable info from us alongside these requests.

3. Use of Cookies

Cookies are small text files placed on your device to enhance your browsing experience. We use them for several purposes:

Preferences: To remember your dashboard settings, such as whether you prefer Light or Dark mode, and your unit preference (Celsius vs. Fahrenheit). This is managed via local storage.
Analytics: To monitor website traffic and usage patterns, helping us improve speed and layout.
Advertising: To serve relevant ads based on your browsing history, as detailed in the section below.

4. Google AdSense and Advertising Compliance

WeatherZine utilizes Google AdSense to display advertisements. Because of this, certain third-party systems are active on our site:

Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on our site.
Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to our users based on their visit to our site and/or other sites on the Internet.
Users may opt-out of personalized advertising by visiting Google's Ads Settings.

We comply entirely with Google's policies for publishers. We do not use deceptive ad placements and clearly demarcate advertisement zones from our core weather dashboard content.

5. Your Rights

Depending on your jurisdiction (such as under the GDPR or CCPA), you may have the right to request access to, correction of, or deletion of any personal data we hold about you. Because we do not require account creation, the data we hold is generally limited to non-identifiable web server logs. However, if you have concerns, please contact us.

6. Changes to This Policy

We reserve the right to modify this Privacy Policy at any time. Any changes will be posted on this page with an updated effective date. We encourage you to review this page periodically to stay informed about how we are protecting your information.

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please reach out via our Contact Us page.