(I'm not the person you are asking, but): People often don't really know how sensitive the barometric pressure data could be, if used for tracking purposes. The barometer in your smartphone can help provide your physical location to within 1 meter, if used for location tracking instead of weather forecasting. If used for weather forecasting, the altitude data is treated as noise and will not be used to find your location.
However, it is now mandated by the FCC that all barometer-carrying smartphones will report your accurate altitude information to 911 emergency response if you make a 911 call from your smartphone. So the location tracking element of the barometer is a very real concern for a lot of people, as it can tell a tracking company what floor of a building you are on at any given moment.
However I think it's quite clear that weather apps, and The Weather Company, are much more interested in the local atmospheric trends than they are about your current floor.
That's a good response to an admittedly pithy comment. I suppose the point I was trying to make was that most people have never considered their devices barometric capabilities. And that the OC was throwing a kneejerk "data-collection is bad" response, and deciding to uninstall because data-collection of any kind is bad.
That's why I'm still inclined to believe "privacy vs. progress of mankind, pick one" soundbite. It's a perfect example of data that's really useful if collected this way at scale. Destroying large-scale data collection because advertisers/Evil Future Government is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
> The barometer in your smartphone can help provide your physical location to within 1 meter, if used for location tracking instead of weather forecasting.
How can this possibly be true? Wouldn't the pressure around a couple of square meters simply equalize instantly? You're not saying "within a mile" you're saying "to within 1 meter", and I don't get it.
Well first, I'm in the weather industry, not the location-tracking industry, but I will share some of the insight for how this could be done. The barometer won't help with your latitude or longitude usually, because you are correct: the pressure will be approximately equal in those dimensions when you are looking at such a small area.
The barometer is sensitive to altitude changes much much smaller than a meter, probably something like 0.1 meters. So if you are a person, with a smartphone, and you are in a tall building, the barometer can assist with determining which floor you're on. Other sensors would need to be used for calibration (since the changes weather will affect the floor-level) and it doesn't help with the x,y coordinates, just the z. But other location systems are now very very good at x,y and they mostly lack the z.
So by adding the high-accuracy relative altitude capabilities of the barometer to the existing x,y systems, you can get extremely precise locations.
If anything the deal with IBM should make you more worried. It's more likely that intelligence agencies have hooks in IBM than the Weather Network, and barometric data can be another heuristic to define who/where you are.
The barometric data is only useful if you know where the reading was taken, right? So you're sending (at least!) pressure + location to their servers. Probably some identifying information as well.
