Our Privacy Policy

Information we collect through your use of our products

When you use any of our online platforms or apps we collect information that helps us to deliver the service you have chosen and to improve your experience. This is done through cookies and other technologies. Examples of the type of information we may collect are:

• Browser
• Email Provider
• The pages you read on our websites and how you got to them
• Device
• IP address
• Internet Connection
• Location (in some cases)

You can also volunteer to disclose additional information which may not be essential for us to deliver a service to you. By providing it you help us to ensure we communicate with you in a way that’s most relevant, useful and engaging for you. We may collect and ask for additional information when you order, purchase, register, subscribe or make use of our products or services in any way, for example in person, via our marketing campaigns, via phone or mail orders, or our websites.

Information we receive from third parties

We occasionally work with third parties who provide additional information that you have shared with them, such as your telephone number and postal address (for example if you’ve moved house or updated your phone number and we need to contact you with important service information). Some third parties may also share further information about your interaction on our sites to help us personalise our services to you. More information can be found in the Audience Profiling section below.

Information we do not track

We do not track or collect any sensitive information about you. This includes race, religion, ethnicity, and political opinion.

How we use your information

We primarily use your information for the purpose of delivering the products and services that you have chosen and to personalise our interactions (including advertising) with you. For further details about this, and other ways we may use your information, please read the sections below.

To provide products and services

• To fulfil your orders and contracts with us (across all our products and services including The Economist, 1843, Learning.ly, The Economist E-store, GMAT Tutor, The Economist Intelligence Unit (“EIU”) subscriptions, The Economist Events, Signal Noise, Bazian, Eurofinance and Commercial Payments International) this includes our third party specialised payment providers.
• To manage your access to our online content and apps, and to send you content via push notifications, newsletters, EIU subscriptions if you have requested us to do so.
• To send you service notifications related to your product or service such as subscription renewal notifications, password resets and order confirmations.
• To manage customer service queries and complaints.
• To manage your privacy preferences and to ensure you only receive communications that you have requested, which may include using your details to suppress you from communications.
• To send you administrative emails about your account, reminders for upcoming events, service changes, or new policies. These updates, changes and notifications are essential for the services that you have selected.
• To provide general location-based services (e.g. the region or country you are in), advertising or search results for our content.
• To detect and reduce fraud including fraudulent orders.
• To prevent users from posting illegal, offensive or objectionable comments on our site.
• To run competitions, prize draws and promotions or if you agree to be a speaker or contributor at, or in, one of our events, projects or films. In these cases, subject to any specific terms The Economist Group agrees with you separately, you grant a global right to The Economist Group to use your name, picture, likeness, voice, biographical information and statements, for advertising, trade, publicity and promotional purposes in all media now known or discovered afterwards and on the internet.

To deliver marketing and advertising

We need your consent to use your information for some specific purposes such as marketing, brand response communications and personalised advertising. Ways in which we will use your information if you consent are as follows:

We may send marketing communications via a range of channels including email and push notifications and you can opt out of these at any time. If you give us marketing permission, we may contact you to tell you about special offers and related or similar products or services within The Economist Group.

We may pass your information to specially selected third parties who would like to contact you with information regarding their own products and services such as other subscriptions, events or content services. Those parties are responsible for their use of your data and you should read their privacy policies carefully. For more information on how we work with third parties please see the section below.

We will ask you if you wish to opt-out of such marketing when you first sign up to receive our products or services. You can also update your preferences for your Economist subscription at any time via your online account at economist.com or by contacting customer services (see ‘Contact us’). You can also opt out of email marketing by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of our emails. Other parts of The Economist Group will inform you of how to opt out of such marketing communications, or you can contact us. This does not apply to important service notifications such as payment confirmations (as covered in the section above) or where we have some other legal basis for contacting you.

In order to deliver advertising and marketing messages that are relevant to you, we may use the information we hold about you, including details that we collate from your use of our services or third parties, such as more precise information on your location or your company’s profile (ie. company name, company size), to ensure that the advertising you see is of interest to you.

Other uses of your information

Other than where we have asked for your consent, we mainly rely on two other separate bases to lawfully use your information. First, we need to use your information in certain ways to provide our products or services to you, in accordance with our contract(s) with you. In this case, it is necessary for us to use your information so that we can deliver the products or services you have chosen. Second, as described in more detail below, in certain cases, we may use your information where necessary to further our legitimate interests, where those legitimate interests are not overridden by your rights or interests, including:

To measure customer and user response and engagement with our products and services such as online content, email newsletters and subscription offers. This may include sharing your information with third parties who help us to analyse and measure these things.

To ensure our products (including websites and apps) are compatible with the browsers and operating systems used by most of our visitors.

To help us improve our customer and user experience and to support new product development. We may send customer satisfaction surveys and market research questionnaires (for which we may share your information with third party suppliers employed by us).

To create audience profiles for personalised advertising, marketing or research and development on and off our websites – See Audience Profiling and Social Media sections below for more detailed information.

To detect and reduce fraudulent activity and for other security related purposes such as to help us protect against harassment, IP infringement, crime or other security issues.

For any purpose required by law or regulation and to verify information that we provide to third parties for compliance and audit purposes such as the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC). We may share your personal data with a third-party auditing organisation such as ABC so they can verify aggregated statistics about circulation and usage of our products or review our policies, processes and procedures for compliance with relevant standards. You can view their privacy policy by following this link.

You have the right to object to any of the above uses of your information, please contact us if you wish to do so. We will consider all objections reasonably, but there may be legal reasons where we deem that the use of your information is still appropriate. We will explain our decision to you in a timely manner.

The Economist Group’s Cookie Policy

The Economist Group operates a strict Privacy Policy around the world. We are committed to being transparent about how we use Cookies on The Economist Group’s sites and the technologies that underpin their collection and usage.

Why Cookies are important

Cookies help make your online experience more efficient and relevant to your interests. For instance, they are used to remember your preferences on sites you visit often, to remember your user ID and the contents of your shopping baskets, and to help you navigate between pages more efficiently.

Please read below for more detail.

What is a Cookie?

Other technologies linked to Cookies

What types of Cookies and other technologies does The Economist Group use and why?

Google Analytics

How can I delete or opt out of Cookies?

Frequently Asked Questions

Changes and updates to our Cookie Policy

What is a Cookie?

A Cookie is a small file, or files on your computer, phone, or other device with a browser to save snippets of text for reference by the website you are visiting.

All Cookies have expiration dates in them that determine how long they stay in your browser:

Session Cookies – these are temporary Cookies that expire (and are automatically erased) whenever you close your browser. For example, we use session Cookies to grant access to content and enable commenting (things you have to login to do).

Persistent Cookies – these usually have an expiration date and so stay in your browser until they expire, or until you manually delete them. For example we use persistent Cookies for functionality including not re-showing the cookie banner when you’ve made your choice. We also use persistent Cookies to better understand usage patterns so that we can improve the site for our customers.

We’ve included more details below to help you understand what kinds of Cookies and other technologies we use.

Other technologies linked to Cookies

There are other technologies which can seem similar to Cookies, but are not the same, including pixels and site tags. These pixels or tags can be used to retrieve information such as your device type or operating system, IP address, time of visit, etc. (Please see our Privacy Policy for more details on the types of information that may be collected.) They are sometimes used to create or access the Cookies on your browser, but are not Cookies themselves. Only Cookies which you can control will appear in the Cookie consent tool.

What types of Cookies does The Economist Group use and why?

Cookies are grouped into the following categories:

1. Essential – these are Cookies that are required for the regular operation of our websites. For example, some Cookies allow us to ensure that people can access the subscription pages in the correct region and language for them, access the log-in pages, or carry out fraud detection and security checks (along with other similar things). These are essential for the website to work properly.
2. Functional – these remember your preferences, and are intended to make your experience on our websites better for you. For example, a functional Cookie is used to remember your log-in details securely this makes it possible for users and subscribers to return to our sites without having to log in every time. We also use a functional Cookie to remember your Cookie preferences from our Cookie consent tool.
3. Analytics – these Cookies are used for performance measurement to understand things including how many people visit our websites, how they navigate our sites, and what content is popular. This allows us to improve your experience with us. Full details of the Cookies we use for analytics purposes can be found in our Cookie consent tool.
4. Advertising – these Cookies enable us and our advertising partners to serve you with relevant advertisements that we think will interest you (often called behavioural advertising). You might see these advertisements on our sites including economist.com or on other sites you visit. These Cookies record your visit to our website and the content you interact with, and may also be used to manage the number of times that you see an advertisement. They may be placed by us, or by advertising partners with our permission.
5. Marketing – these Cookies enable us to track your online activity to help us deliver The Economist Group advertising and to limit how many times you see these adverts.

To ensure compliance with our policies, we restrict the use of third-party Cookies to trusted partners of The Economist Group. For example, we currently allow partners including:

• JW Player, Youtube, Brightcove for our multimedia platform, Google Ad Manager and Doubleclick (Google) for our advertising platform;
• We also use third party information from third party sources to enable us to deliver advertising. Establishing a particular audience demographic allows us to target advertising based on browsing behaviour stored in a Cookie. These sources are validated by the third party, not by us.

Google Analytics

We use Google Analytics to understand the traffic to our sites. You can see how Google Analytics (one of our analytics tools) uses Cookie information when you use our partners’ sites by visiting http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners, or any other URL Google may provide from Time-to-time.