A personal weather station website looks like a thermometer. It is also a small public server. It writes IP addresses into access logs, may point a camera at a street, and often stores unit preferences in cookies. At /privacy.php the historical TNET Weather station site kept a privacy URL. Recovered copy was a generic commerce policy—orders, credit cards, a children’s section, even another company’s name in the legal-action paragraph. That text is not a description of a PWS, and it is not rehosted.
This article is about the actual privacy surface of a station site. It is operational guidance for operators and a plain reading for visitors. It is not legal advice, not a jurisdiction-specific notice, and not a substitute for counsel. It is distinct from the Cumulus-host cookie-policy pages, which cover dashboard unit cookies and disclosure classes for those cookies.
Historical context
Hobby weather templates of the 2000s borrowed privacy language from shopping carts because shopping carts shipped a privacy.php. A station site that never took a card still published paragraphs about order status and third-party processors. That mismatch is itself a privacy failure: the document describes a business the site is not.
What the URL still names is a real problem. A PWS is visited by neighbors, by other operators, by bots, and by people who never agreed to be on a webcam. The publisher holds logs. The camera may hold a view of someone else’s yard. The browser may hold a cookie that only remembers Celsius. Those are three different kinds of information. A useful privacy page names them. A copied shop policy does not.
The original recovered body is not used here. Domain restoration does not make modern TNET the historical firm named on that page, and it does not import that firm’s (or a template vendor’s) privacy promises. Modern TNET Weather is an independent research service. This legacy URL remains a 200 article about PWS privacy, not a live account of every cookie on the current product.
Three surfaces that actually exist
Server logs and IP addresses
A typical web server records time, path, status code, user-agent, and the client IP for each request. That log is not weather. It is operational telemetry about who fetched the weather.
Operators used those logs to debug FTP failures, to see whether clientraw.txt was being hammered, and to feed visitor maps. Geolocating an IP to a city and pinning it on a map is a derived display. It is not an observation of the atmosphere, and it is not a verified identity. Carrier-grade NAT, VPNs, and crawlers make the pin a guess.
What to treat as sensitive:
- raw logs with IP and timestamp together;
- any export that joins an IP to a query string (old contact forms, admin paths);
- public “visitors from” widgets that imply a person is at a lat/long.
What logs are good for:
- proving that a feed was fetched at a time (provenance of access, not of temperature);
- finding a runaway scraper;
- noticing that a page nobody uses is still being hit after a rename.
A privacy page should say that logs exist, roughly how long they are kept if the operator actually knows, and that they are not sold as a product. Inventing a seven-year retention because a shop template said so is a false document.
Webcam neighbors
A station webcam is often sold as “sky and horizon.” In practice it sees roofs, cars, sidewalks, and people. Those people are not visitors. They did not load privacy.php. They are bystanders in someone else’s instrument.
Operational rules that do not require a lawyer to state:
- Point the camera at sky, trees, or the operator’s own instruments when the goal is weather.
- Treat street-level identifiable faces, license plates, and neighboring yards as out of scope unless the operator has a reason that is not “it came with the mount.”
- Do not advertise a live residential webcam as a tourist feed.
- If you archive frames, the archive inherits the same view. Frozen video is still a view of a place.
- A timestamp on the image is metadata for the sky, not consent from a passerby.
This is not a claim about any one historical TNET frame. Recovered webcam pages are not rehosted here. The point is the class of risk: a PWS privacy page that talks only about “your email on the guestbook” and never about the camera is looking at the wrong person.
Preference cookies
Dashboards stored unit system, language, and sometimes which panel was open. That is presentation state on the visitor’s machine. It is not a second thermometer, and it is not an account.
The Cumulus-host articles own the detailed split: what a cookie-policy document should disclose versus how unit cookies should be migrated. This station-host page only needs the privacy-relevant sentence: a Celsius cookie is not personal profiling, an analytics cookie that counts unique visitors is a different class, and advertising cookies were never required to show a temperature.
If the station never set analytics or ads, the privacy page should not claim that it did “to be complete.” If it set a visitor counter cookie, say so, and point at the visitor-counter article for why those counts are a poor scientific metric.
What a PWS privacy page is not
It is not a credit-card policy. If the site never processed cards, do not describe card processors.
It is not a children’s-privacy program copied from a retailer. Do not invent collection you do not do.
It is not legal advice. Retention rules, cookie consent, and webcam statutes vary by place and change. This article does not interpret them. Operators who need a compliance document need a person qualified to write one for their jurisdiction.
It is not the current TNET product privacy statement. Legacy /privacy.php is a historical path about station-site practice. Do not read it as the live policy for Connection Outlook or accounts.
It is not a guestbook. If the old site had a public name-and-email wall, that was a separate publication of visitor-supplied data. A privacy URL should not silently become that wall.
Practical checklist for operators
- Inventory what you actually collect. Logs, webcam, cookies, optional forms, optional guestbook. Delete paragraphs about orders you do not take.
- Separate weather from people. Temperature files are the scientific product. IP logs and camera frames are not.
- Do not publish raw logs. A public “hit map” is already a privacy choice; a downloadable access log is a worse one.
- Date the page. Privacy practice changes when you add a counter, a camera, or a form. An undated policy is an undated instrument.
- Retire dead forms. A contact POST that still accepts bodies is collection. See the contact-scope article.
- When you sell or abandon the domain, stop collecting. The next registrant should not inherit your mailbox or your camera archive as if it were theirs to operate.
How visitors should read an old privacy URL
Treat recovered shop language as template residue, not as a promise still in force. Treat a restored hostname as a new publisher unless the page clearly says otherwise. This restoration says otherwise: modern TNET is not the original team, and this article replaces a mismatched policy with an original explanation of PWS surfaces.
If you are worried about a current TNET product page, use the live site’s current legal and help surfaces—not this legacy path. If you are worried about a webcam on a living station you can still identify, that is a matter for that operator and, where needed, local rules—not for a historical /privacy.php.
Modern relevance
The surfaces did not disappear. Pi stations, cloud dashboards, and CDN logs still hold IPs. Consumer cameras still see streets. Preference storage moved partly into localStorage and app settings; the scientific mistake is the same if you archive a screenshot without noting that the visitor had forced millimetres.
Research systems that ingest public weather and network records have a related duty: say which fields are atmospheric evidence and which are access metadata. TNET’s public note on source identity is data sources, quality controls, and methodology. That page does not interpret privacy law. It is the right next step for “what kind of record is this.”
TNET research bridge
Logs and cameras are easy to confuse with weather because they sit on the same hostname. Provenance language—what was measured, what was derived, what is only a fetch record—is data sources, quality controls, and methodology. That is the primary modern destination from this URL.
How the service works frames the current research product. The legacy hub and site-history hub collect the station-site identity and operations pages, including the About article and the operations log.