Privacy Policy

Salty Forecast ("Salty Forecast", "we", "us", or "our") is a free hyperlocal weather app for Florida's Gulf coast and the Keys, available on the web at saltyforecast.com and as an iOS app. The app is operated by Austin Tracy and hosted courtesy of Lasbury Tracy Realty. You can reach us any time at austin@ltrhomes.com.

• No account, login, or sign-up is required to use the app.
• We don't sell, rent, or trade your personal information — ever.
• We don't use advertising networks or cross-app tracking.
• We use anonymous, privacy-friendly analytics to count visitors and usage — no ads, no personal profiles, and we never sell your data.
• Your location is used only to show you nearby weather, and only if you turn that feature on.
• Your app preferences are stored on your own device, not on our servers.

The app can show weather for your current position through a "Use my location" feature. This is entirely optional — you can use Salty Forecast by picking a spot from the list and never share your location at all.

If you do enable it:

• Your device asks for your permission first. You can decline, and you can revoke access at any time in your device settings.
• Your approximate latitude and longitude are used to fetch the forecast, tides, marine conditions, radar, and air quality for that area from the weather data providers listed below.
• We use your coordinates in the moment to build your dashboard. We do notstore a history of where you've been on our servers, and we don't attach your location to an identity or profile.
• To turn coordinates into a friendly place name (for example, "Englewood"), the app makes a reverse-geocoding request to a third-party service (BigDataCloud). Only the coordinates are sent, with no identifier.

If a future version of the app offers storm, wind, or rain alerts and you choose to turn them on, your device gives us a push notification token — an anonymous identifier that lets Apple deliver a notification to your device. We store that token together with the spot(s) and alert types you asked for, so we can send you the right alert. It isn't linked to your name or contact details, and you can turn alerts off (which removes the token) at any time. Alerts are not offered today; this section describes how they will work when they are.

Your chosen spot, your selected beach cameras, and small housekeeping flags (such as whether you've dismissed the "add to home screen" tip) are saved locally on your own device using your browser's storage. This data stays on your device, is used only to remember your settings, and is cleared if you clear your browser/app data.

Salty Forecast does not ask for your name, email, phone number, or payment information to use the app, and there are no user accounts. We don't build advertising profiles, we don't use advertising SDKs, and we don't track you across other apps or websites. The limited, anonymous analytics we do use are described in the next section.

To understand how many people use Salty Forecast and which features are worth improving, we use privacy-friendly, aggregate analytics. This lets us see things like how many people visit, how many come back, and how many save the app to their phone — never who you are.

• We use PostHog and Vercel Web Analyticsto count visits and measure general usage. These run without advertising cookies, and we don't use them to build a profile of you or follow you around the internet.
• The data is anonymous. We don't attach your name, email, or precise location to analytics, and we don't sell or share it with advertisers.
• We also collect basic error diagnostics — for example, if a page fails to load — so we can fix problems, again without identifying you.

The weather itself comes from public and third-party services. When the app loads data for a spot (or for your location), a request is made to these providers, which may include the relevant coordinates:

• Open-Meteo — forecast, marine, and air-quality data.
• NOAA (CO-OPS tides and NDBC buoys) — tide predictions and offshore observations.
• RainViewer and Tomorrow.io — radar and precipitation imagery.
• Ambient Weather Network — nearby personal weather-station rainfall.
• Ecowitt— data from the app's own local weather station.
• BigDataCloud — reverse geocoding (coordinates → place name).
• Vercel — hosting and delivery of the app and its data requests, which involves standard server logs (such as IP address) kept transiently for security and reliability, plus Vercel Web Analytics for anonymous visitor counts.
• PostHog — privacy-friendly, anonymous product analytics and error diagnostics (see the Analytics section above).
• Apple Push Notification service — delivery of weather alerts, if you enable them.

These providers have their own privacy practices. We share only what's needed to return the weather (typically coordinates), never your identity.

Salty Forecast is a general-audience weather app and is not directed to children under 13. We don't knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided us personal information, contact us and we'll address it.

We keep the data footprint small on purpose, which is the best protection there is. We don't maintain user accounts or a database of personal profiles. Any push tokens are retained only while your alerts are enabled. Server logs from our host are kept only transiently for operating and securing the service. No method of transmission or storage is ever 100% secure, but we design the app to hold as little about you as possible.

• Use the app without sharing location by selecting a spot from the list.
• Grant or revoke location access in your device settings at any time.
• Enable or disable weather-alert notifications (when available) at any time.
• Clear your saved preferences by clearing the app's/browser's storage.
• Contact us at austin@ltrhomes.com with any privacy question or request.

If we update this policy, we'll revise the "Last updated" date above and, for material changes, provide a more prominent notice in the app. Continuing to use Salty Forecast after an update means you accept the revised policy.

Questions about this policy or your data? Email austin@ltrhomes.com.