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Privacy Policy
Our commitment to privacy: Gold Book, a division of Metroland Media Group Ltd., a subsidiary of Torstar Corporation, knows that protecting the privacy and confidentiality of personal information is important to consumers. Collection, use and disclosure of personal information by Gold Book and its affiliates are governed by the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (the "Act"), and any applicable provincial legislation. This Privacy Policy explains what personal information is collected from its customers and how it is used. It also explains how you can ask questions, make suggestions, and complain about our privacy practices. This Privacy Policy applies to personal information (see below) collected by Gold Book, including its websites. Be aware that our websites may contain links to other websites provided and maintained exclusively by third parties not subject to this Privacy Policy. Please review the privacy policies on any external websites to determine their information handling practices.
For a listing of Gold Book affiliates, please go to www.torstar.com and click on Torstar Properties.
If you have any additional concerns or questions, we encourage you to contact us and we will address your concerns to the best of our ability. Please read this Privacy Policy carefully, and check back periodically as we update it from time to time. By submitting your personal information to Gold Book, you signify your agreement to the terms and conditions of this Privacy Policy.
What is personal information? Personal information is any information about an identifiable individual. Personal information does not include the name, title, business address or telephone number of an employee of an organization. Information used solely for journalistic purposes is exempted from the Act.
Gold Book is responsible for personal information under its control. Our employees are informed about the importance of privacy and receive periodic information to update them about our Privacy Policy and related policies. In addition, Torstar Corporation has appointed a Privacy Officer to oversee personal information-handling practices of Gold Book and its affiliates.
Children: If you are under 18, be sure to obtain your parent or guardian's permission before you send any personal information to us, or anyone else, over the Internet. We encourage parents to get involved with their children's online usage and to be aware of the activities in which they are participating.
What personal information do we collect, and why?
Gold Book collects personal information for specific, limited purposes. Information is collected by fair and lawful means.
- If you enter a contest or other promotion, we use your personal contact information to administer the contest or promotion including contacting, announcing and promoting prizewinners.
- We collect credit card information if you purchase any product or obtain any service from Gold Book. This credit card information is used for the purpose of fulfilling your order.
- If you complain to any of our departments, we collect your contact information and the nature of your complaint, for the purpose of investigating and responding to you.
- If you are a freelancer, or other service provider, we collect your social insurance number for tax reporting purposes and your contact information in order to pay you. We may also collect financial information (for example, banking details and credit history) to assess your credit risk, sales data to prepare royalty reports and other information to help us evaluate your services.
- Purposes for the collection, use or disclosure of personal information, which are not set out in this Privacy Policy, will be set out at the time of collection. You will be given a reasonable opportunity to opt-out of any additional purposes no later than the time of collection.
We also collect certain non-personal information, like internet cookies and data for market research:
- Internet Cookies: An internet cookie is a small piece of information that a website stores on your internet browser. We may use cookies to better understand how you use our websites, to make sure our ads and dynamic content are served correctly and to improve the performance of our websites. For example, a cookie may recall a set of preferences you have set for our website and record items that you have registered for. Storing cookies on your web browser allows us to present you with custom web pages and other content that are tuned with your preferences. For example, if you are a registered user, you may see a welcome page with your name on it. These activities are invisible to you, and are generally intended to improve your internet surfing convenience. Unless you have set your preferences so that you will be alerted when a cookie is being stored on your computer, you won't know about it. If you are concerned about cookies, it is possible to turn them off in your web browser preferences. However, please be aware that by disabling cookies, you may not be able to use all portions of our websites, particularly pages requiring registration.
We may place advertising or other links on our sites that originate from outside advertisers. If you view these ads, the advertisers may assign a cookie. Gold Book does not control these cookies, nor is it responsible for any marketing or other use of your name by these advertisers.
To whom does Gold Book disclose personal information, and why? Gold Book may disclose your personal information under the following circumstances:
- Gold Book may transfer your personal information to service providers acting on its behalf in order to perform processing and other specialized services, for example, prize fulfillment of our contests, collection of overdue accounts, product delivery, or credit card processing.
- When Gold Book needs to disclose your personal information to unrelated parties, for example, if we find you have violated any stated terms of service or conditions of purchase, or if we need to comply with applicable laws and lawful governmental requests, other legal and regulatory authorities and other legal reasons.
- Gold Book 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 will 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.
Consent: We reserve the right to use and disclose your personal information without consent where required or permitted by law, for example, if we have reasonable grounds to believe the information could be useful when investigating a contravention of a federal, provincial or foreign law, in order to protect or defend our legal interests, or to comply with applicable laws and lawful governmental requests.
Safeguards: Gold Book maintains personal information in a combination of paper and electronic files. We take technical, contractual, administrative and physical security measures to protect your personal information. When you provide credit card information to use, we work to help protect the security of your credit card information by using industry standard secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption technology.
Please be aware that email is not a secure medium, and any personal information you send to us by email could be intercepted. If your communication is very sensitive, or includes information such as your credit card number, you should not send it electronically unless the email is encrypted or your browser indicates that the access to our website is secure. Materials posted to online forums such as bulletin boards or chat rooms are public, not secure and may be viewed by anyone. Any personal information you post may be collected and used by anyone and may result in unsolicited messages from other internet users.
How to challenge our privacy practices: Gold Book encourages you to contact us with any questions or concerns you have about your privacy or this Privacy Policy. If you have a question concerning Gold Book Privacy Policy, would like a copy, or if you have a complaint, please contact:
Gold Book
Customer Service, Privacy Policy
400 Wellington St. N., Suite 1
Hamilton, Ontario L8L 5B1
info@goldbook.ca
Customer Service can successfully deal with many issues. If you prefer, or if after contacting Customer Service, your concerns or questions have not been resolved to your satisfaction, you can contact Torstar Corporation's Privacy Officer in writing as follows:
Privacy Officer
Torstar Corporation
One Yonge Street, 6th floor
Toronto ON
M5E 1P9
Fax: (416) 869-4183
This Privacy Policy was last updated on April 16, 2008.