A list of the Torstar Companies and some of our major brands:

The Torstar Companies include:

Torstar Corporation
Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
Metroland Media Group Ltd.
Performance Printing Limited
Free Daily News Group Inc.
Eyereturn Marketing Inc.
The Toronto Star Children’s Charities
Digital Auto Ventures

Major brands associated with the Torstar Companies include:
Toronto Star
thestar.com
Metro/metronews.ca
The Hamilton Spectator
thespec.com
The Waterloo-Region Record
therecord.com
wheels.ca
autocatch.com
save.ca
toronto.com
The Kit/thekit.ca
wonderlist.ca

Other brands include

Certain digital properties and services may be subject to additional notices or policies.  We may link to websites or applications outside of our control, including our payment processors, which may have their own policies.  Our products and services are also subject to any applicable terms of use.

What is not covered by this policy?

Personal Information for Editorial or Journalistic Purposes – Information collected for editorial or journalistic purposes, whether it is considered “personal”, is exempt from the requirements of privacy legislation and is not covered by this policy.

Information that is not personally identifiable, such as anonymous or de-identified information and aggregate data that cannot be associated with a specific person, such as demographic statistics about our customers, or number of visitors and average time spent on a website, may be collected and used by us and third parties including advertisers.

Any other information or circumstance that falls outside the scope of or is exempted by applicable privacy legislation, including permitted uses of business contact information (including the name, title, business and email address and telephone number of an employee of an organization) and publicly available information such as an individual’s name and address when listed in or made available through a directory.

Additional detail about what information we collect and why:

• Customized Experience and promotions: We tailor content, recommendations, communications and advertising to your interests, providing you with more relevant information.  We may use your contact and transaction information, usage and device data and other personal information to provide you with content recommendations and tailored communications, and to send promotional communications about our products and services, to track your use of our products and services across the devices that you use to access our digital properties, and to provide you with a customized experience.
• Non-promotional communications:  We use your contact and transaction information to provide you with communications about products and services you purchase or use.  You may not opt out of these communications, however, you may close your account.
• Internal analytics:  We use IP addresses, cookies, pixel tags, web beacons and other technologies to gather demographic and statistical information about our users, including information about user behavior and interaction with our digital properties and with emails and other communications we send to you, and your location and device type,  to administer our digital properties, to understand how you interact with us and our digital properties, to improve our products and services, to develop new products and services, for systems administration and to diagnose problems with our servers, to detect fraud and to improve security.
• Enforce our terms of use: We may use your personal information to contact you regarding or otherwise enforce issues with your use of services such as posting on online forums, subject to our applicable terms of use.
• Other administrative reasons:  If you make a complaint or send a request to customer service, we will keep the relevant information to investigate your complaint or request and respond to you.  If you provide freelance or other services to us, we may collect your social insurance number for tax reporting purposes and other information required to enter a contract with and pay you. If you are a shareholder, we collect your contact information and share account information to administer shareholdings and communicate with you.  If you are a former employee we may collect your banking, family contact information and your employment history to administer your pension or other benefits. We use your personal information for the purposes of managing, administering, collecting or enforcing your accounts, maintaining business records for a reasonable time and generally managing and administering our business and meeting relevant Canadian and international regulatory, legal, insurance, audit, security and processing requirements.
• Corporate reasons:  Torstar Companies may disclose your personal information to parties connected with the contemplated or actual financing, insuring, sale, assignment or other disposal of all or part of our business or assets, including for the purposes of determining whether to proceed or continue with such transaction or business relationship or fulfilling any records or other reporting requirements to such parties.  We require such parties to treat your personal information in accordance with this privacy policy and to use and disclose it only for the purposes for which it was collected.
• As permitted or required by law:  Torstar Companies may disclose your personal information as permitted or required by law including to third parties if we believe you have violated our terms of service or conditions of purchase, if we need to comply with applicable law including lawful access requests, or for certain business transactions.
• Your information may be transferred or stored outside of Canada: Your personal information may be processed and stored outside of the province in which you reside and/or outside of Canada by us or a third party service provider for the purposes set out in this policy.  Under the laws of these jurisdictions, in certain circumstances foreign courts, law enforcement or regulatory agencies may be entitled to access your personal information.
• We may disclose your contact information on a confidential basis to our advertisers for newspaper or flyer delivery verification.

User-generated content and public activities:  We offer you opportunities to engage in public activities, which are any actions you take that are designed to be visible to others, including comments, recommendations, reader reviews, ratings, classified listings, public user profiles or any other items that you submit.  Any information you disclose in your public activities, along with your screen name or ID, or any image or photo, becomes public and may be used by the Torstar Companies for online and offline promotional or commercial uses in any and all media. 

If you choose to engage in public activities, you should be aware that any personal information you submit can be read, collected and used by other users.  We are not responsible for the personal information you choose to make public and we have no responsibility to publish, take down, remove or edit any of your public activities or submissions. You agree that all sharing is deemed to have been done by you.  Public activities may be included in our RSS fees, APIs and other distribution formats and thus your public activities may appear on other websites, blogs or feeds.  For more information, please see the applicable terms of use.  When you share, or recommend links to content on a third-party platform such as Facebook or Twitter, that action and any information you share will be subject to their privacy policy.

Our use of Cookies:  If you use any of our digital properties we and our third party service providers may use cookies and other technologies such as JavaScript, Adobe Flash, web beacons and pixels to better understand your behavior and interaction with our digital properties and with communications sent to you (such as open and click activity) and to improve your user experience and recognize you and/or your device, to make sure our ads and dynamic content are served correctly and to improve the performance of our digital properties.  For example, a cookie may recall a set of preferences you have set and record items for which you have registered.    Storing cookies on your browser allows us to give you customized experiences.  More information about cookies and other technologies commonly used by Torstar Companies may be found at https://eyereturnmarketing.com/privacy/.  We may use third party service providers in order to gather such data on user behaviour and to provide us with other data collection, reporting, ad response measurement and site analytics.  These third party service providers may include Google Analytics and Google Firebase Analytics, which use data as described here:  How Google uses data when you use our partners' sites or apps. You may opt-out of data analytics services provided by Google at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

If you wish, you may disable cookies in your browser or delete them.  While we do not require the use of cookies, some functionality may be disabled and your web surfing experience will be degraded.

Consent and your personal information:  The form of consent required for the collection and use of your personal information depends on what is reasonable in the circumstance.  We may assume consent from your actions.  For example, if you provide us with your personal information for a subscription, we assume that we may also send you notices related to your subscription and bill you.  This is an example of implied consent.  No consent is required for certain uses, such as to comply with a court order or investigate a breach of an agreement or applicable law, or for use of de-identified information.

In general, we assume your consent for all purposes set out in this policy.  If it is reasonable to do so, we will provide further notice at the point of collection.  If personal information collected or compiled is sensitive in nature, or it is otherwise reasonable in the circumstances, we will provide you with an opportunity to expressly agree, such as a check box.  Where consent is required to use your personal information, you may opt-out of our use of your information.  More information about accessing, updating and opting-out may be found here.

Sharing information with merchants:  We will only share personal information with a merchant if you purchase something or register something relating to that particular merchant, and we will only provide as much information to the merchant as is necessary for these purposes.  These merchants may contact you directly with respect to such products or services.  Information provided to a merchant will be subject to that merchant’s policies and practices.

Safeguards:  The Torstar Companies use technical, contractual, administrative and physical security measures to protect your personal information in a manner that is reasonable for the nature of the personal information you provide to us.  If you are a subscriber or register for our services, access to your information on our servers is password-protected, and we help protect the security of your credit card information by using industry standard secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption technology.

If you choose a direct payment gateway to complete a purchase, our payment processors store your credit card data.  It is encrypted through Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).  All direct payment gateways adhere to the standards set by PCI-DSS as managed by the PCI Security Standards Council, which is a joint effort of brands like VISA, MasterCard, American Express and Discover.  PCI-DSS requirements help ensure secure handling of credit card information.

We also offer secure https access to our websites. We regularly monitor our systems for possible vulnerabilities and attacks.  However, the internet is not 100% secure and we cannot guarantee that information may not be breached.  Please guard your login information carefully and use a strong password.   Email and other similar forms of communication may not be encrypted.  Please do not send sensitive personal information or other confidential information through these means.

Children: Our digital properties are not targeted to children and Torstar Companies do not knowingly collect personal information from children.  If you are under the age of majority in your jurisdiction of residence, please get your parent or guardian’s permission before using our digital properties or providing any personal information to us.  We encourage parents to get involved with their children’s online usage and to be aware of the activities in which they are participating.

Data Retention:  We retain the personal information you provide while your account is in existence or as needed to provide you with requested products or services.  You may always access and update personal information you have provided to us, opt-out of uses of your personal information in accordance with our access and opt-out procedures, and you may close your accounts with us.  Upon these actions, we will correct or cease to use your personal information for such purposes. We may retain your information for a reasonable period for re-engagement purposes.  Information included in analytics reports may be retained.  We will retain your information if it is reasonably necessary to comply with our legal obligations, meet regulatory requirements, resolve disputes, prevent fraud and abuse or enforce this policy or our terms of use.

For the Toronto Star and related properties (including toronto.com and wonderlist) contact customer service at 1-800-279-0181 or email us at privacy@thestar.ca.