Canada (PIPEDA)

What are the Canadian regulations regarding cookie consent?

The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) is the federal data privacy law that governs the commercial use of Canadian residents' personal information.

In PIPEDA, personal information is defined as any kind of data that can identify an individual, including the data that most cookies and trackers collect from your website's users, such as IP addresses, unique IDs, search, and browser history.

If you have users all over Canada, you may think that complying with all of the laws would be a huge undertaking. However, it is not that difficult.

The PIPEDA and the laws of the Canadian provinces were designed to be similar to each other to streamline business compliance. If you comply with the provincial law, you are likely to follow federal PIPEDA and other provinces' data protection laws as well. However, make sure you thoroughly review all of the requirements before assuming that you are compliant.

As Canada's PIPEDA requires you to inform users and obtain their consent, PIPEDA compliance means knowing and controlling all cookies and tracking technologies in use on your website, plus having a solution for collecting the valid consents of users to all of those cookies that you use.

If you want to know more about the different regulations you can access our article "Laws and regulations for each region"

How should a cookie banner be to comply with this?

A cookie consent banner is required to collect meaningful consent from users for each specific purpose of processing, and a to comply with this regulation, the cookie banner should have the following characteristics:

• Provide Detailed Information About Cookie Use: The cookie banner should contain information about why the website uses cookies. For example, does it collect data for analytics, advertising, or social media purposes?
• Alert the User if the Website Shares Data with Third Parties: If the website shares the data collected through cookies with third parties the cookie banner should explain this.
• Link to the Website’s Cookie Policy: Here the website will provide further information about the cookies in use on the site, including a list of all the cookies.

Observations: With illow's GDPR banner, your site will be ready to comply with Canadian regulations.

If you want to know the different types of banner cookies that you can find on our platform, access our article "Types of banners you will find on our platform"