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ARTICLE · 01 JUNE 2021

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The Right To Erasure Of Personal Information In Canada: Between Fact And Fiction

Borden Ladner Gervais LLP
Borden Ladner Gervais LLP
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It is increasingly common for businesses to receive requests from customers asking for the deletion of all of the information that the business holds about them.

CanadaPrivacy
Éloïse Gratton
Éloïse Gratton
Andy Nagy
Andy Nagy
Simon Du Perron
Simon Du Perron
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It is increasingly common for businesses to receive requests from customers asking for the deletion of all of the information that the business holds about them. Such requests raise the issue of whether there is a right to the deletion or erasure of personal information under Canadian data protection laws.

The concept of the right to erasure comes from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is frequently referred to as the benchmark legislation for data protection around the world. Effective as of 2018, the GDPR grants several rights to data subjects, including in Article 17, a right to obtain the erasure, as soon as possible, of personal data that a business holds about them, where one of the following grounds applies:

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