Los Angeles settles Weather Channel lawsuit, lets it keep selling location data to advertisers

Los Angeles has settled its lawsuit against the operator of The Weather Channel app. The city filed litigation against the company in 2019, alleging that the app misled millions of people into granting access to their personal location data and sold that data to third parties.

While IBM is celebrating this moment by calling those original claims “baseless” in a statement to The Verge, it sounds like they were largely true — since the only thing the settlement requires is for The Weather Channel to proactively warn users that yes, your location data is for sale.

As part of the settlement, the app’s operator, TWC Product and Technology LLC, and the app’s owner, IBM Corporation, have agreed to revise the location-tracking disclosure...

Continue reading…