Privacy policy

What this site is

smw.org is an individually-run personal site: a weather/commute/flight dashboard, a world map, a couple of small tools ("Lists," a commute planner), and a set of AI-tended reading pages called "Beats." Most of the site can be browsed without creating an account or submitting any personal information.

Information collected automatically

• Your public IP address, read from open IP-echo services, to power the "what this page can see" display and to default the weather/map location to roughly where you are.
• Standard technical access data (IP address, browser type, pages requested, timestamps) that Amazon CloudFront, which delivers every page on this site, may retain briefly for operational and security purposes. This is infrastructure-level logging, not an analytics product, and this site's own code never reads it.
• If you allow it, your browser's geolocation — used only to set the weather/map location and kept in your browser's local storage, never sent anywhere but the free weather/mapping services listed below.

Cookies & local storage

This site's own code does not set tracking cookies and runs no analytics. The signed-in tools — admin, Lists, and commute — use your browser's local storage to hold a sign-in token so you stay signed in between visits. That token identifies your session to this site only; it is not used to track you elsewhere, and clearing your browser's site data or signing out removes it.

Advertising (Google AdSense) not yet live

This site is not currently showing ads. Some pages — the "Beats" reading pages — are being prepared to show ads served by Google AdSense once approved. When that's live: Google and its advertising partners use cookies (including the DoubleClick/advertising cookie) and similar technology to serve ads, which may be personalized based on your visits to this and other sites, unless you opt out. You can see and manage the categories of ads shown to you, or opt out of personalized advertising entirely, at Google's Ads Settings, and see how Google uses information from sites that use its services at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.

For visitors in the EEA, UK, and Switzerland, ads will not be enabled until you've made a consent choice through an on-page prompt, in line with Google's Consent Mode requirements — you won't see ads (or the cookies behind them) before that choice is made.

Ads are scoped to Beat pages only — the "about," "commute," "Lists," and "admin" areas of this site are personal tools, not content, and never carry ads.

Your choices

• Opt out of personalized advertising (once ads are live) at Google Ads Settings or, industry-wide, at aboutads.info (US) / youronlinechoices.eu (EU).
• Clear this site's local storage (browser settings → site data, or the "sign out" control in a signed-in tool) to remove your sign-in token at any time.
• Turn off browser geolocation at any time; the map/weather panels fall back to a manually-entered location.

Third-party services this site talks to

None of these receive more than what a feature needs to work (e.g. a location you've typed in), and none are used for advertising or tracking today:

• US National Weather Service & NOAA (forecast, radar, river levels, public-safety alerts) — a free US government API.
• AirNow & Open-Meteo (air quality).
• OpenStreetMap / Nominatim (place lookup) and Wikipedia (capital-city facts).
• Transitland and Amtraker (public transit data, commute tool).
• ADS-B Exchange (nearby aircraft).
• Anthropic Claude and xAI Grok (generate the text on Beat pages; no visitor data is sent to them).
• Amazon Web Services (hosting: S3, CloudFront, Lambda, Cognito).

Children's privacy

This site is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect personal information from them.

Changes & contact

This policy may be updated as the site's features change; the date at the top reflects the latest revision. Questions about this policy can be sent to the site owner.