Lighthouse
The short version
- No account. Lighthouse never asks for your name, email or any sign-in.
- No ads, analytics or tracking. The app contains no advertising, analytics, crash-reporting or tracking SDKs, and doesn't use the advertising identifier.
- Location for the forecast only. With your permission, and only while the app is in use, your location is used to get the forecast where you are.
- Your places stay yours. Saved places and settings live on your devices and sync through your own iCloud account. Rivolu doesn't receive them.
- We don't sell or share personal information. We hold no profile of you, so there is nothing to sell.
Who we are
Lighthouse (also called Lighthouse Weather) is a weather app for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch, with widgets and Apple Watch complications, made by Rivolu LLC ("Rivolu", "we", "us"), a company based in the United States. This policy covers the Lighthouse apps and this website, lighthouseweather.fyi. Rivolu is responsible for the information handled as described here.
What stays on your device
To work, Lighthouse keeps the following on your device, in the app's own storage, shared only with its own widgets and its Apple Watch app:
- Your settings: units, chart layers, forecast choices, refresh options and similar choices.
- Your saved places, with their names, coordinates and time zones.
- Recent forecasts and weather alerts for your places, so the app, widgets and watch open quickly and agree with each other.
- A record of which severe weather alerts you've already been notified about, kept for up to a week, so you aren't notified twice.
Your iPhone passes your places, settings and recent forecasts to your paired Apple Watch directly, using Apple's Watch Connectivity. Deleting the app removes everything it stored on that device.
iCloud
Your saved places and settings sync between your devices through iCloud key-value storage, under your own Apple Account. This is a service of Apple; Rivolu has no access to it and receives none of it. Apple's handling is described in Apple's Privacy Policy. Deleting a saved place in Lighthouse removes it from iCloud too. If you turn off iCloud for Lighthouse, your places stay on each device separately.
Location
Lighthouse asks for permission to use your location while the app is in use. It never asks for access in the background, and you can use it without location at all by adding places by name.
When you allow it, your location is used for one thing: getting the forecast for Current Location. The app sends its coordinates to the weather service providing that forecast (see below), and on the weather map it draws a dot where you are, on your device.
To check for severe weather alerts in the background, Lighthouse uses where Current Location was last found while the app was open; it doesn't look up your location again in the background. The Apple Watch app asks for its own permission and uses location the same way.
Your location is not sent to Rivolu, not stored by us, and not used for anything else. You can change the permission at any time in Settings on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, or in System Settings on the Mac.
Services the app uses
Lighthouse gets the weather, finds places and draws its maps by talking to the kinds of services below. As with any connection on the internet, each one also receives your device's IP address and basic technical details of the request. None of them receives your name, email, Apple Account or any identifier from us.
| Service | What it's for | What it receives |
|---|---|---|
| Weather forecast providers | Forecasts and severe weather alerts for your places, including any second forecast you choose for a chart layer (Lighthouse Pro). | The coordinates of each place whose forecast is shown (your saved places and, if you allow it, Current Location), with the place's time zone and the dates and layers asked for. |
| Place search providers, including Apple Maps | Finding places by name, and the time zone of a place you add. | The words you type in search and the app's language, and the coordinates of a place you pick. Apple's handling is described in Apple's Privacy Policy. |
| Our weather map service, operated by Rivolu | The weather map's forecast data (Lighthouse Pro). | Requests for the same worldwide forecast files everyone gets. They carry no location and no identifier. |
| A map tile provider, credited on the map | The base map under the weather map: coastlines, borders and place names (Lighthouse Pro). | Requests for the map tiles of the area you're looking at. |
These providers receive only what each request needs to answer it. We don't share your personal information with them beyond that, and nothing they receive identifies you to us. If you'd like to know which providers Lighthouse uses, email admin@rivolu.com.
Notifications
If you turn on severe weather notifications, Lighthouse checks the alerts for your places on your device and shows a notification there when one is issued. We don't run a notification server, and no notification token or device identifier is sent to us.
Purchases
Lighthouse Pro is an auto-renewing subscription sold by Apple through the App Store. Apple handles payment and your purchase; Rivolu never receives your payment details. Your subscription status is checked on your device with Apple's StoreKit. Apple provides us with sales and subscription reports that don't identify you. Apple's handling of your purchase is described in Apple's Privacy Policy. You can manage or cancel the subscription in your Apple Account settings.
No ads, analytics or tracking
Lighthouse contains no advertising and no third-party analytics, crash-reporting, advertising or tracking SDKs. It doesn't access the advertising identifier (IDFA), doesn't track you across apps or websites, and doesn't build a profile of you.
If you've chosen to share analytics with app developers in your device's settings, Apple may give us aggregated crash reports and usage statistics about Lighthouse. Apple collects these, not the app, and they don't identify you to us. You can turn this off in Settings, under Privacy & Security, Analytics & Improvements.
Emailing us
If you write to us, for example from the app's Contact Support command, we receive your email address and whatever you choose to include, and use them only to reply and to improve Lighthouse. We don't add you to any mailing list. Ask us and we'll delete the correspondence.
This website
lighthouseweather.fyi is hosted by Vercel, whose servers process standard request data, such as IP addresses, to deliver pages and keep the site secure. We use Vercel Web Analytics to count page views. It uses no cookies and doesn't identify individual visitors. The site sets no cookies, has no advertising or social media trackers, and serves its own fonts and images rather than loading them from third parties.
Children
Lighthouse is a general-audience weather app. It doesn't knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children under 13 (or the equivalent age where you live).
Your rights
Depending on where you live, laws such as the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) give you rights to access, correct, delete or move personal information a business holds about you, to object to or restrict its processing, and to complain to a data protection authority.
Because Lighthouse has no accounts and we don't keep personal information about its users on our servers, there is usually nothing for us to access, correct or delete. The information Lighthouse uses is under your control:
- Remove saved places in the app, which also removes them from iCloud, or delete the app to remove everything it stored on a device.
- Change or revoke location and notification permissions in your device's settings at any time.
We don't sell personal information, or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, as those terms are defined under California law. Where the GDPR applies, the limited processing described here is based on our legitimate interest in providing the app you asked for, and on performing our contract with you when you subscribe. For any request or question, email admin@rivolu.com; we'll respond as the law requires.
Retention and security
We keep personal information only as long as we need it: emails you send us until the conversation is resolved, unless you ask us to delete them sooner. We use reasonable measures to protect the little information we handle, and every connection the app makes is encrypted. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, though, and we can't guarantee absolute security.
International users
Rivolu is based in the United States. The services listed above, and this website's hosting, may process requests in the United States and other countries, where data protection laws may differ from those where you live.
Changes to this policy
If Lighthouse changes how it handles information, we'll update this page and the effective date at the top before the change takes effect.
Contact
Rivolu LLC
Privacy questions and requests: admin@rivolu.com
Support and feedback: feedback@rivolu.com