Your weather. Your privacy.

Who and what this covers

This policy covers the Dreadcast Mac app and the Dreadcast website preview. “We” means Kevin Fleming, the publisher of Dreadcast. For privacy questions, email kevin@dreadcast.app. It does not replace the separate policies of Apple, weather providers, map providers, the website host, or GitHub when you use those services.

Location is your choice

You can enter a five-digit US ZIP code, or choose Current Location and grant macOS permission. ZIP mode does not ask for device location. In Current Location mode, the app rounds the device coordinate to two decimal places before it saves it, geocodes it, or uses it for provider requests. That is roughly a kilometer of resolution, though the distance varies by latitude. The app does not ask for or send a street address. The selected ZIP or approximate coordinate is used to fetch local weather, alerts, radar, air quality, and nearby map layers. You can switch modes and revoke location permission in macOS settings.

What stays on your Mac

The app saves your ZIP, location mode, last approximate coordinate and city/state label when applicable, temperature unit, radar settings, enabled layers, and notification choices in its local preferences. It also saves alert identifiers and delivery dates to avoid repeat notifications. In production builds, any previously supplied Xweather credentials are stored in your login Keychain. Current builds do not offer a credential-entry control to new users.

Weather images and responses may be held in memory or in system-managed network caches. Dreadcast does not use a remote account to sync these settings. Details and deletion steps are in our Data Retention Policy.

What leaves your Mac

Requests go directly from your Mac to the relevant service. Like other internet requests, they expose connection details such as your IP address and request time. Depending on the feature, they can also reveal your ZIP, approximate coordinate, viewed map area, or tile coordinates:

• Apple handles Location Services permission, optional geocoding of the rounded coordinate, and MapKit base maps when selected.
• Zippopotam.us receives the ZIP entered in ZIP mode.
• Open-Meteo receives the chosen coordinate for weather; its air-quality service receives a regional coordinate grid when that layer is on.
• RainViewer and NOAA/NWS receive radar metadata, station, frame, and map tile requests as needed. NWS alerts receives the selected coordinate for local alerts and notification checks.
• NASA GIBS and EUMETSAT receive visible map-area requests for cloud imagery; NIFC receives an area derived from the selected location for wildfires.
• OpenFreeMap receives vector map tile and font requests for the default map. Those tile coordinates reveal the area viewed.
• Xweather receives coordinates, radius, and your own API credentials if optional lightning is configured and enabled.

Storm Prediction Center and National Hurricane Center products are nationwide requests that do not include the chosen location. Providers may keep their own request logs under their own policies. We are checking their logging and retention before finalizing App Store disclosures; we cannot set or erase their logs.

Alerts and purchases

Weather notifications are optional. Dreadcast checks relevant feeds while it is running and asks macOS Notification Center to display eligible alerts. It has no remote push-notification server and does not upload its local duplicate-alert history. If a future release enables Pro purchases, Apple will process those transactions under its terms. The current development build has no working Pro purchase flow; we will revise this policy before that changes.

This website and support

The preview does not require an account and its first-party pages do not set an analytics identifier. The map preview can request tiles from OpenFreeMap. The web host and network intermediaries may record IP address, browser details, requested pages, and timestamps for delivery and security. Its host and log-retention settings have not yet been verified. If you email us, your email address and message reach our email provider and mailbox; the support-message retention schedule is still being finalized. If you follow a GitHub link or submit an issue, GitHub receives the information you choose to provide under its own policy. Please do not post credentials or sensitive location details in a public issue.

Your controls and requests

Change the chosen location and preferences in Dreadcast Settings, turn off a layer or notifications, switch to ZIP mode, or revoke macOS Location and Notification permissions. Removing app preferences or its container clears the local settings and notification history. Keychain credentials can remain after uninstall; remove any Dreadcast/Xweather entry for service com.radarbar.RadarBar.providerCredentials in Keychain Access. System caches are managed by macOS. We cannot delete provider or Apple records from their systems.

Email kevin@dreadcast.app to ask about access, correction, deletion, or withdrawing consent for data we control. Please do not put personal details in a public GitHub issue. Without an account, we may not be able to associate a provider request with you.

Changes

We will date material policy changes here and update the app and App Store disclosures when data practices change. This draft is not evidence that the preview is already published at dreadcast.app or ready for App Store review.