Plaincast has no accounts, no sign-up, no advertising, no advertising or analytics cookies, and no third-party trackers. Nothing you read here is tied to an identity, because there is no identity to tie it to. This page describes what actually happens, service by service.
What stays in your browser
These are stored locally by your browser and are never transmitted to Plaincast or anyone else. Clearing your site data removes all of them.
- theme
- Light or dark, if you have used the toggle.
- plaincast-office
- The last forecast office you read, so the site opens there next time.
- plaincast-visits
- A count of visits, used only to decide when to offer the "add to home screen" prompt.
- plaincast-install-dismissed
- A flag set when you dismiss that prompt, so it is not offered again.
- Session cache
- The current discussion text, held in sessionStorage so a reload does not re-fetch it. It is discarded when you close the tab.
What leaves your browser
- Forecast requests go to the National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov) from your browser. Those requests reach NOAA directly and are subject to the NWS privacy policy.
- Forecast text is sent to Anthropic's Claude, through the Vercel AI Gateway, to be summarized. What is sent is the National Weather Service's published forecast text — never anything you typed, and never anything identifying you. Plaincast has no input field.
- The site is hosted on Vercel, which terminates every request and keeps standard server logs, including IP addresses. Vercel is also where the per-IP rate limit on the translation endpoint is enforced, using the forwarded IP for the length of that check only.
- Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights run on the page. Both are configured by Vercel to be cookie-free and to record aggregate page and performance data without a cross-site identifier.
Location
Plaincast never asks for your location on its own. On a first visit with no office already chosen, your browser may offer the standard location permission prompt so the nearest forecast office can be pre-selected; declining it simply falls back to Los Angeles, and the coordinates are used in your browser to pick an office and are not sent to Plaincast or stored.
The National Desk uses a coarser signal: Vercel supplies an approximate city-level latitude and longitude derived from the connecting IP address, which the server exchanges with the National Weather Service for a forecast-office code. That response is marked never-to-be-cached, the coordinates are not logged by Plaincast, and no permission prompt is involved because no device location is read.
Children, sale of data, and requests
Plaincast is not directed at children, and it knowingly collects nothing from anyone. There is no personal data to sell, share, or trade, and none is sold, shared, or traded. Because no account exists and nothing is keyed to a person, there is generally nothing to look up in response to an access or deletion request — but if you believe otherwise, write to the address in /.well-known/security.txt and it will be answered.
Changes
This page is versioned in public along with the code that it describes. Its history — every word ever changed, and when — is at github.com/jonahberg/plaincast.