A number of you might remember this post regarding Weather Bug from Sept. 23rd of this year. Well Jay from Weather Bug has contacted me regarding this and wanted to make sure I allowed him to respond. Here is the official Weather Bug Response regarding the accusations of Weather Bug being spyware.

Dear Matt:

I would encourage you to reinstall WeatherBug on your ’sacrifical lamb’ machine. You will see that 1) the WeatherBug Companion toolbar is optional if you click the Custom install and 2) no major, reputable spyware detectors list our program because we are not spyware- not Spybot, Adaware, Pest Patrol, Spykiller, Spyhunter, spysweeper, aluria, etc.

The dept of Homeland Security, the National Weather Service (and its NOAA agency), 7000 schools including some of the largest universities in the country, military bases/coast guard bases and the US Naval Academy and over 100 TV stations all have our weather stations and partner with us.

The weather software that 7000 schools use to teach their students about the WeatherBug weather stations won us a Smithsonian Laureate for our CEO.

I don’t want to accuse any companies by name of being spyware, but it’s safe to say their programs don’t win Smithsonian Laureates, have 100 TV stations partnering with them or are used by the Dept. of Homeland Security, National Weather Service or the military. According to comScore we are the 2nd most frequently visited web program in the News and Info category (Oct. 2004) behind only AOL News.

I fully understand that some folks don’t like us, or like our competitors, or didnt like the fact that we partnered with the MySearch toolbar- but we no longer require this toolbar to be downloaded and are constantly making changes and improvements to our programs.

None of them would do so if we were spyware.

You can download at www.weatherbug.com and if you choose Custom you will be able to not install the toolbar if you don’t want to.