Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), scraped personal data
A citation is an address, not a summary. The first part names the law; what follows narrows it to the exact section, article or paragraph.
In force since 1 January 2001.
A personal data rule binding private bodies.
As of 2 September 2026.
What it requires
- Do not assume a public web page's personal information falls outside PIPEDA merely because it was publicly accessible; the no-consent carve-out applies only to information specified as publicly available by regulation.
- Apply PIPEDA's purpose-limitation and accountability obligations to personal information collected by crawling, the same as personal information collected any other way.
What this law does
Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.
Applies to personal information an organization collects, uses or discloses in the course of commercial activity, without a general exemption for information that happens to be publicly accessible on the web.
A narrow regulatory carve-out lets an organization collect, use or disclose personal information without consent where it is both publicly available and specified by regulation, but that carve-out is defined by regulation rather than by the fact of public accessibility alone, so scraping a public page does not, by itself, take the resulting personal information outside PIPEDA's other obligations, including purpose limitation and accountability for onward transfer.
The full obligations this instrument imposes are researched in the privacy topic's PIPEDA entry for this jurisdiction; this row records only the personal_data dimension the scraping topic tracks separately. This is the same underlying statute as the privacy topic's PIPEDA instrument for this jurisdiction; its short_code is qualified to avoid colliding with that document's short_code in the shared /l/ namespace.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_webtrains_modelsaggregates_contentprocesses_biometricsprocesses_voice
Read the law
official consolidated statute text, Department of Justice Canada Justice Laws Website