Who we are
CornerFacts ("we", "us") is an independent, privately run website based in Ontario, Canada, with no connection to the City of Toronto, Toronto Police Service or any other data publisher. Privacy questions can be sent to the contact address on the About page.
The short version
- We do not ask for your name, email address or any other personal information anywhere on the site.
- We set no cookies and store nothing in your browser beyond what the page itself needs while it is open.
- We run no advertising, no analytics and no social-media trackers.
- We never sell, rent or share visitor data. There is essentially none to share.
- The only data that reaches us is what every web server receives automatically when a page is requested, held briefly in our hosting provider's logs.
What is collected, and why
Standard server logs. The site is served by Vercel, our hosting provider. Like any web host, Vercel records each request — the page requested, the date and time, your IP address, your browser's user-agent string and the referring page — and keeps those records for a short period. We use them only to keep the site running, to understand rough traffic levels, and to detect abuse. They are not joined to any other data and are not used to build profiles.
Live camera freshness checks. Intersection pages with a City traffic camera ask a small function on our server how old the City's current image is (a request to /api/cam naming the City's image address). That request is logged like any other page request and contains nothing about you.
"Near me" on the map. The city map has a Near me button. If you press it, your browser asks for permission to share your location; the position is used inside your browser to move the map and sort the list, and it is never sent to us or stored anywhere.
Search. The search box downloads a small index of place names to your browser and matches what you type locally. Search terms are not sent to us.
Correspondence. If you write to us to report an error or ask a question, we keep the message for as long as it takes to deal with it and for a reasonable time afterwards, and use it only for that purpose.
Third-party services your browser talks to
To display a page your browser fetches resources directly from a few other organisations, each of which sees your IP address and browser details as part of that request and applies its own privacy policy:
- Vercel — hosting and content delivery for every page (Vercel privacy policy).
- Google Fonts — the two typefaces the site uses are loaded from Google's font servers (Google Fonts privacy FAQ).
- OpenFreeMap — background map tiles for the intersection and city maps, drawn from OpenStreetMap data (openfreemap.org).
- unpkg — a public content-delivery network that serves the MapLibre map library (unpkg.com).
- City of Toronto open-data servers — live traffic-camera images and the fixed reference views are loaded by your browser straight from the City's server; we do not relay or store them.
We do not control these services and do not receive any data back from them about you. If you prefer not to contact them, browser extensions that block third-party requests will stop the fonts, maps and camera images from loading while the rest of each page continues to work.
Cookies and browser storage
CornerFacts sets no cookies. It does not use local storage, session storage or any other persistent browser storage. We are not aware of any of the third-party services above setting cookies through this site, but their behaviour is theirs to describe, not ours.
Personal information in the data we publish
The site publishes information about places — intersections, neighbourhoods, buildings, roads — drawn from datasets that governments release under open licences. Collision, crime, ticket and traffic figures are counts and rates with no details about the people involved. Names appear only where the source data attaches a public role or a business to a place — the sitting councillor for a ward, a restaurant's registered name on its DineSafe record — exactly as the publisher released them. Live camera images are the City of Toronto's own low-resolution public feed, shown as the City serves it and never recorded by us. Apartment-building records link to LandlordReport, a sister site with its own privacy policy.
If you believe a page contains personal information about you that should not be there, tell us and we will look at it promptly. Where the information comes from a public dataset we will also point you to the publisher, who controls the source.
Children
The site is not directed at children and, since it collects no personal information, we do not knowingly hold any about anyone, of any age.
Your rights under Canadian law
We follow the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). You may ask what personal information we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, or withdraw consent to its use; in practice the only personal information that could exist is a server-log entry or an email you sent us, and we will tell you plainly what we have. If you are not satisfied with our answer you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Visitors outside Canada are welcome; the site is operated from Canada and any data it holds is handled under Canadian law.
Security
Every page is served over HTTPS. The site is generated in advance from public data and holds no database of visitors, so there is no store of personal information to breach. Our hosting provider's logs are protected by its own security programme.
Changes to this policy
If the way the site works changes — for example, if we ever add analytics, a newsletter or a comment form — this page will be updated first and the date at the top will move. Continued use of the site after a change means you accept the updated policy.
Contact
Questions, access requests and corrections: see the contact details on the About page. Our terms and conditions describe how the site's content and data may be used.