Bowcast privacy policy
Effective July 12, 2026
Bowcast estimates the chance of seeing a rainbow around you. It is built to know as little about you as possible.
Location
Bowcast uses your approximate location to compute estimated rainbow chances for the area around you. On the website, coordinates rounded to about 1 km go to Bowcast's shared forecast cache and to the weather and geocoding providers listed below, never with your name or any account identifier. In the packaged apps, forecasts are computed on your device and coordinates go only to those providers. If you deny location access, you can search for a place instead, and only that place's coordinates are used.
Rainbow alerts
If you turn on alerts, we store two things on our server: your device's push token and coordinates rounded to two decimal places, so we can send alerts for your area. Turning alerts off deletes the token from our server. We send alerts through Google Firebase Cloud Messaging and Apple Push Notification service, which process the delivery. Registrations that have not refreshed for 180 days are removed automatically.
Optional rainbow reports
If you choose to report whether you saw a rainbow, Bowcast sends the yes or no result, the observation time, relevant forecast values, and a coarse location to our server. Coordinates are rounded to two decimal places before transmission and storage. The stored report contains no name, email address, push token, advertising identifier, raw IP address, or exact location.
We keep these anonymous reports so we can study forecast performance and periodically calibrate the estimated chance. Coarse coordinates may be used to balance reports from different areas, group reports from the same weather event, and test the calibration on held-out regions. Location is not used as a predictive model input and is not included in published model files. Each report has a random report ID so a network retry does not create a duplicate.
Reports do not change the forecast immediately. Bowcast trains candidates in batches and adopts one only after minimum data-coverage and held-out performance checks pass. Sending a report is optional.
What we do not do
- No accounts, no names, no email addresses.
- No analytics or tracking SDKs.
- No sale or sharing of personal data with anyone.
Service providers
- Open-Meteo: weather forecast data (receives forecast coordinates).
- CARTO and OpenStreetMap: map imagery.
- BigDataCloud: place names for nearby forecast points (receives those points' coordinates).
- Windy Webcams: live webcam embeds on the Now page.
- Google Firebase / Apple APNs: push notification delivery (only if alerts are on).
- Google Firebase Firestore: storage for optional anonymous rainbow reports and push registrations when configured.
Advertising
Bowcast currently shows no ads. If ads are added to a future version, this policy will be updated first and the app will ask for any consent the law requires.
Data deletion and contact
Turning off alerts removes your push registration. Local settings and unsent reports are deleted when you remove the app. Reports contain no direct account or device identifier. You can ask us to delete a report if you kept its report ID. A deleted report is excluded when the next model candidate is trained; an already published aggregate calibration is replaced only after a new candidate passes the safety checks. For any request or question, contact i@shamseddin.net.