For as long as I've been running a weather station (4+ years) I've uploaded data to online weather services: first to Wunderground in return for an ad-free app, later to Weathercloud in return for notifications of outages. A few things have made me reconsider if I should continue and I'd be interested in the views of others.
First, as background, I'm reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. It's about the monetisation of data about humans, rather than the environment, which, as the ultimate public good is arguably a special case for us to disregard any costs. Then I happened to notice today that Weatherflow is proposing to pay a dividend to owners of Weatherflow stations in future, presumably based on a share of profits, a bit like a credit union ($20 or so per annum, profits permitting). Naturally, it raises the question of the value of what many already give away to Wunderground, WeatherCloud etc. It's not that the amount of money matters but ... it appears that large sets of meteorological data that are potentially important for climate research are, at least potentially, being walled off into privately controlled fiefdoms for the purposes of rent extraction--even as the climate is going to hell in a handbasket. This is not something I want to support, merely for the vanity of having a pin in a digital map, or the convenience of an add-free experience when using an app (which I almost never use in any case). I'm about to buy a new weather station. The two shortlisted vendors, Ambient and Ecowitt, each run their own cloud services with associated maps showing their own contributors. Even if they were doing this for free it's mildly annoying to realize that the few weather stations in my area are scattered across different services and that some are inaccessible without buying hardware or paying a fee. Of course, I understand that services cost money to provide, but the fact is that the service providers are harvesting data provided to them at no cost -- indeed people are paying for the privilege of giving it away -- and then reselling it. To what extent, if any, do we have a moral obligation to upload weather data regardless of any such considerations? Are some services more deserving of support than others? I presume everyone knows about the scandal of Accuweather reselling location information harvested from users of an app without their consent. Actions like this will now incur heavy sanctions in the EU. Aside from the ethical questions, I've also realized 1. I rarely use either Wunderground of WeatherCloud 2. New stations increasingly just upload straight to the cloud 3. Wunderground, at least (and probably others), don't permit correction of erroneous data 4. Weathercloud wants to be paid to allow you to download your own data if it's more than a year old 5. Weathercloud accepts realtime data only 6. Wunderground accepts historical data, but several days worth was discarded for no obvious reason recently when I got my WH1080 back online after a rasperry pi outage (it was uploaded) which made me wonder again why I bothered. (And if that wasn't enough, I discovered the hard way that WeeWX configured to use the Simulator will upload fake data to services like Wunderground if they're still enabled. Fortunately I noticed immediately and stopped it continuing. Annoying even if Wunderground don't care much for data quality.) A related wrinkle: The market leading vendor in terms of product quality and service, Davis, has, notoriously, attempted a form of digital protectionism by erecting a toll gate for people to access their own data. FineOffset, the market leader in terms of sales volume is the manufacturer of Ambient branded hardware sold in the US. Whereas FineOffsett equipment is largely compatible across a variety of other brands (Ecowitt, Froggit etc.), and Ecowitt's online service is available to all, not just to customers, Ambient restricts its online service to customers (using hardware MAC addresses). While there are interesting underlying geopolitical considerations here, I'm a pragmatist. I'm committed first and foremost to managing my own data locally whatever happens. However, I can't help wondering if it's time to stop uploading to Wunderground and Weathercloud because it isn't *really* worthwhile for me, and I'm *somewhat* skeptical of the public utility. (And if I wasn't already, the dire acting of the concerned citizens anxious about climate change and wanting to help by buying a new Weatherflow weather station in Weatherflow's latest Kickstarter campaign video, would trigger some doubt.) Anyone else a bit disillusioned? Pulled the plug? Views? Sorry for the long message and thanks for any reflections. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "weewx-user" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/weewx-user/154b0542-aebb-4b09-828d-42ef5e313215%40googlegroups.com.
