Last updated 8 September 2026.
This service does not ask who you are. There are no accounts, no sign-in, no advertising, no analytics or tracking SDKs, and no crash reporting. Nothing you do on the board is tied to an identity, because no identity is ever collected.
There is one exception, and it belongs here rather than in the small print: if you turn on a daily follow in the iOS app, the train you follow is stored on a server — the line, the time, and the kind of day — against a token identifying that installation. That is a record of a commute, and this page is not going to call it anything else. Nothing at all is stored unless you switch it on, and it is described in full below.
The Android and iOS apps make ordinary HTTPS requests to this site for the
public departures feed at /v1/departures — the same address
your browser fetches when you load the board. Each request carries only what
any web request carries: the URL, an application name and version in the
User-Agent header, and a cache validator so unchanged data need
not be sent twice.
The apps do not send an advertising ID, contacts, or your location. The apps never ask for location permission at all — the board shows Union Station, and knowing where you are would not change what it says. There is exactly one thing an app can send beyond an ordinary request for the feed, it happens only on iOS, and only if you switch it on yourself: see Daily follows.
If you ask either app to track a train you are catching now, it shows that train's platform — on the Lock Screen on iOS, in an ongoing notification on Android — and keeps it current by fetching that same public feed from your own device. By default, nothing about the train you chose is sent anywhere. The app does the work locally, so no list of who is waiting for which train needs to exist.
Unless you switch on alerts. iOS gives an app no time in the background, so the only thing that can put a platform on your Lock Screen while your phone is in your pocket is a message from a server — and that message has to name the train. So the iOS app asks, once, the first time you reach for tracking, and does nothing until you answer. If you say yes, then for each train you are actually tracking this sends a push token issued by Apple for that one Lock Screen activity, the train it is about, and when it leaves. It also sends the app's ordinary notification token, issued by Apple for this installation, because a Lock Screen activity alone cannot wake a phone that is locked and a notification can. Both go in the same row, and the row is deleted the moment that train goes. If you say no, tracking stays entirely on your device and the paragraph above keeps being true. You can change the answer whenever you like, under Daily follows.
On Android this question does not arise, because the Android app can keep its own notification up to date without help. It sends nothing either way.
You can save the train you take every day so the app recognises it again on tomorrow's board. What that costs differs between the two platforms, and the difference is not a preference — it is what each operating system permits.
On Android nothing changes. The saved commute stays on your device, the app does the work itself, and no server is involved or told.
On iOS a daily follow is stored on a server. Apple does not allow an app to start a Lock Screen activity by itself at a chosen time; only a message from a server can do that, and that message has to name the train it is about — both to label the activity and to subscribe it to that train's updates. There is no arrangement in which the server sends it and does not know which train it is. So if — and only if — you turn on a daily follow, this is stored:
Taken together, that is a record of somebody's commute. Which line, at what time, on which days, tied to one installation of this app. It is not linked to a name, an email address, an account or a payment, because none of those exist here — but a regular journey is itself revealing, and a page that listed these fields without saying so would have disclosed technically and not honestly. This was the price of the Lock Screen keeping itself up to date while your phone is in your pocket. It was weighed, and it is yours to weigh too: the feature is off until you switch it on, and one follow is one journey, not your travel in general.
What is not kept, and never has been: no record of which platform you were shown, no history of the trains you actually caught, no log of which pushes were sent, and no times or places beyond the schedule you yourself chose. The service reads the same public feed anybody can fetch; it does not learn anything about your journey from you.
The first of those is worth being precise about, because noticing that GO has announced a platform sounds like it would need a record of what you were last shown. It does not. An announcement is a fact about the train, not about you, and it is read from the public board, the same one anybody can fetch; what is stored against a tracked train of yours is a single flag saying an alert is owed. It says that you are to be told something. It does not say what.
The record is deleted when you turn off that daily follow, when you turn off the last one, and when Apple reports that the app is no longer installed.
If you would rather none of this existed, the Android app does the whole thing on the device and tells no server anything, and on iOS you can leave daily follows off and track a train by hand, which sends nothing either.
Like every website, this one receives your IP address and request headers in order to send a reply back to you, and those appear in standard server logs. They are used to operate the service, diagnose faults and mitigate abuse. They are not used to build a profile of you, are not combined with anything else, are not sold, and are not shared with anyone except the infrastructure providers below acting on our behalf.
This is a departure board. It is not directed at children and collects no personal information from anyone, of any age.
If this policy changes materially the date above changes with it. Questions, corrections, or a request about your data: use the contact form.
Platforms shown as predicted are this service's own estimate from a train's recent history. They are not provided by GO Transit and have not been announced. Always check the official platform displays before boarding. This service is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, Metrolinx or GO Transit.