Do snow flurries make you inexplicably hangry for truffle fries? The Weather Channel probably knows.
The app, which has ~45m monthly users, is fresh off a lawsuit with the city of Los Angeles for secretly selling location data to advertisers. The main consequence: the Weather Channel now has to disclose that your data is going to a 3rd party.
But now the Weather Channel app is changing how it’s tracking you. Instead of following people with tracking cookies, it’s trying to learn how the weather shapes shopping habits.
The Weather Channel can micro-target how small weather changes impact what a population buys in the aggregate, then sell that info to marketers.
Let’s say the channel learns that rainy weather is the No. 1 driver of Balenciaga Crocs sales.
Crocs would love to know about it. So when a certain region gets a forecast for rain, Crocs could do a location-based marketing blitz.
Some of the Weather Channel’s early findings:
Some of them are pretty careful with personal data. Dark Sky, which Apple recently acquired, has said that it will never share location data to 3rd parties or data monetization companies.
But most other apps aren’t. Accuweather, for instance, has been known to sell location data even when the app isn’t active.
The Weather Channel’s pivot is one way forward. Instead of tracking individuals, now the app can look at spending patterns across a population.
Is that better for privacy? Maybe slightly. But next time it thunders, brace yourself for an onslaught of Crocs ads.