Los Angeles sues the company behind the Weather Channel app, which is owned by IBM, for slyly using location data for commercial purposes
The Weather Channel app deceptively collected, shared and profited from the location information of millions of American consumers …
Context & Ripple Effects
This suit lands at the peak of a location-data reckoning: weeks earlier, a New York Times investigation documented apps sharing precise location with 75+ companies including advertisers, retailers, and hedge funds, and AccuWeather had already been caught sending iOS location data to a monetization firm even when sharing was switched off (AccuWeather's location leak). Los Angeles is now applying consumer-protection law to that ecosystem, targeting the most-downloaded weather app as its test case.
For IBM, which owns The Weather Company, the suit attacks the commercial engine behind a free consumer product — and the company kept leaning into location-derived value even mid-litigation, launching hyperlocal forecasts built on smartphone sensor data days after the filing.
First-order effects
- IBM and The Weather Company must defend their app's disclosure language in court, with the city alleging deceptive collection, sharing, and sale of millions of consumers' location data — putting the app's core ad-monetization model on trial.
- Users of the Weather Channel app are the direct subjects of the alleged practice: their precise movements were reportedly treated as a commercial asset without clear consent.
Second-order effects
- Every weather and utility app running the same free-app-plus-location-data playbook — AccuWeather among them — faces pressure to rewrite consent flows before regulators or cities replicate LA's theory against them.
- Data brokers and downstream buyers named in the broader supply chain lose a low-cost source of precise location if weather apps tighten or abandon location resale.
Third-order effects
- The pattern ends in consent-as-product-design: by 2020, The Weather Company settled with LA and agreed to change how it informs users about tracking and data sales, establishing a disclosure template other app publishers would be measured against.
- If municipal consumer-protection suits keep succeeding where federal action lags, location data becomes a liability-priced input rather than a free byproduct, restructuring how ad-funded apps value user position.
The trend: Consumer location data is shifting from an unpriced byproduct of free apps to a regulated, consent-gated asset, with city attorneys and state law filling the enforcement gap left by federal inaction.