How Will The EU GDPR Affect Canadian Businesses?

The new European privacy regime—the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is now in force. Although its broad scope may impose new privacy obligations on a larger number of Canadian businesses, the impact of the GDPR in Canada is unlikely to be significant in the short term. Rather, the influence of EU privacy standards on how Canadian privacy laws are amended and interpreted in the longer term promises to have a more direct impact on Canadian businesses than the GDPR itself.

What You Need To Know

• GDPR, like Canada's federal privacy law, PIPEDA, imposes obligations on companies which handle personal data: information that can be used to directly or indirectly identify individuals (e.g., name, email address, social networking posts, etc.). It also requires organizations to have consent of the individual to handle their personal data unless certain exceptions apply.