Show HN: Quiet Sky, a weather app built for privacy
github.com
I wanted to share an app and privacy proxy I made. I'd appreciate your feedback and thoughts.
I've been frustrated for years by the fact that weather apps use our information to track us in real time. I searched high and low for a weather app that promised privacy. I was surprised I couldn't find one. Even apps with good privacy policies make no guarantees about how the provider will use your information. I decided this would be a good time to make an beautiful weather app that delivered on the privacy commitment cleanly.
Many of you probably know weather apps are one of the silent ways your location gets sold. The NY Times did a piece on this a few years ago. Most of the apps take your location for a forecast, then pass your that plus your IP and device ID to either directly to ad networks and data brokers, or to providers who then do the same. There are some good apps and providers, but it is difficult to tell. I wanted a weather app that couldn't leak who you are, and I thought you should be able to check it your self.
I approached this pretty simply. The weather provider should get the forecast question, not your identity.
Every request routes through a small proxy I run (a Cloudflare Worker). It strips your IP address, device ID, and any identifier before anything goes upstream, so the provider gets a coordinate and nothing else. The proxy has to receive your connection to answer it, like any server does, but it doesn't log or forward your IP. The provider only ever sees the proxy's shared IP. There's no account, and there are no tracker SDKs in the app.
The privacy core of the proxy is open source, Apache 2.0, so you can read exactly where identity gets removed: https://github.com/NW-Hiker-Skier/quietsky-privacy-proxy. The provider integrations and API keys aren't in there. I wanted to keep some things private, and some providers don't allow parts of the integration to be exposed.
Full disclosure: I also didn't open source or make the whole app free. There is a cost to run the service, so the app is paid and closed source and only the proxy core is open. I'm a solo developer. Someone has to pay for it, and I'd rather that be users than advertisers.
I'd love for your thoughts about the proxy. Happy to answer anything about how it works, or where the limits are.
Side note. I had fun writing a privacy manifesto for weather too. You can find it under the story on the website. https://getquietsky.app/