Last updated: September 16, 2026. North Weather is built to work with as little personal information as possible: no accounts, no advertising, no analytics trackers and no sale of data.
North Weather (northweather.net) is run by an independent site operator, who is the person in charge of protecting personal information for this website. You can reach the operator at info@northweather.net.
When you visit, our server looks up the approximate city for your IP address in a local copy of the MaxMind GeoLite2 database — no outside service is contacted. We use it only to open the forecast for your area (for visitors from the United States, the nearest U.S. city) and to show its name in the header. The IP address itself is not saved by the website. The approximate result is cached for up to 24 hours under a hashed form of the address, so the lookup does not repeat on every page, and is then discarded. Once you have used the location button (see below), the lookup is skipped.
To check how well these lookups work, we also keep anonymous daily counts of their outcomes — for example, how many found a nearby place and how many fell back to Toronto. The counts contain no IP addresses, locations, cookies or browser details, and are deleted after 90 days.
If you press the location button and allow it in your browser, your browser shares your coordinates with us. We round them to about 100 metres, use them once to find the nearest place in our list (near the Canada–U.S. border, the country from your IP address decides which side is meant), and send you to its forecast. The coordinates are not stored or shared. You can refuse or withdraw this permission at any time in your browser settings.
What you type in the search box, including postal codes, is used only to find matching places; the website does not keep a record of your searches. Like any page address, a search can appear in the hosting provider's technical logs described below. The last five places you opened are shown as "Recent locations" when you click into the search box. That list is kept only in your browser, is never sent to us, and can be cleared with the Clear link next to it.
Your chosen place, °C/°F choice, light or dark theme and recent places are remembered on your own device. The full list is on the Cookies page.
If you email us, we use your address and message to reply and to fix what you reported. We keep the correspondence only as long as needed to deal with it, and in any case no longer than 12 months, unless the law requires otherwise.
Like every website, our hosting provider records technical logs — IP address, date and time, the page requested, the referring page and browser type — to keep the service secure and to troubleshoot. These logs are kept for a limited period set by the host and are not used to identify or profile visitors.
Maps and some images are loaded directly by your browser from third-party servers: Esri (basemaps), OpenWeatherMap (precipitation map layers), NASA GIBS (satellite imagery) and NOAA's National Hurricane Center (hurricane outlook graphics). As with any web request, those servers receive your IP address and browser information, and their own privacy policies apply. When our server fetches forecasts from Environment and Climate Change Canada, WeatherAPI.com or Open-Meteo, it sends only a place's coordinates — never information about you.
The website is hosted on servers outside Canada, and email is handled by an email service provider. Information processed there may be subject to the laws of those countries, including access by their authorities. We choose providers that protect information to a standard comparable to Canadian law.
All connections to the site are encrypted (HTTPS), access to servers and email is limited to the operator, and we keep as little as possible for as short a time as possible.
Under Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and, in Quebec, the Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector, you can ask whether we hold personal information about you, get access to it, have it corrected, withdraw your consent, and — where the law provides — have it deleted or receive it in a commonly used format. Because we keep so little, in most cases we will not hold anything that can be linked to you, but we will always check. Write to info@northweather.net with "Privacy" in the subject line; we answer within 30 days.
If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada or, in Quebec, the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec. If you are in the European Union or the United Kingdom, you may also contact your local data protection authority; our legal bases there are legitimate interest for the approximate IP location and server logs, and your consent for precise location.
If we ever add analytics or advertising, we will update this policy and the Cookies page before they go live and ask for your consent where the law requires it. The date at the top shows when the policy last changed.