Destroy or anonymize: the end-of-life duty for personal information under Quebec's Law 25 (English)
Section 23 of Quebec's Law 25 requires that once the purposes for which personal information was collected or used have been fulfilled, the enterprise must destroy it or anonymize it in order to use it for serious and legitimate purposes, subject to a retention period set by another law. Law 25 defines anonymization itself: information is anonymized when it is, at all times, reasonable to expect in the circumstances that it can no longer, irreversibly, identify the individual directly or indirectly, following generally recognized best practices and criteria set by regulation. Pseudonymization, which remains reversible or allows cross-referencing, does not meet that test. Section 3.2 requires governance policies to set out the framework applicable to retention and destruction, and section 8 requires the enterprise to disclose, on request, how long information about a person will be kept. In practice: build a retention schedule by category of information, flag information whose purpose has been fulfilled, destroy it or anonymize it to the section 23 standard, and check first whether another law requires keeping it longer. HelionAI helps organizations organize and document their retention and destruction schedule alongside the privacy officer record and the ÉFVP.
Not legal advice. HelionAI is a software tool, not a law firm. The information provided is general in nature and does not constitute legal advice. For a specific situation, consult qualified legal counsel.