Does PIPEDA apply when you share records from your Canadian family archive?

What to take away

Where the Act actually reaches

The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act governs how private-sector organizations handle personal information in commercial activity. Its ten fair information principles run from accountability to individual access. The full text is short enough to read in an evening.

Personal information means information about an identifiable individual. A birth date, a street address, a medical note, a face in a photograph, a signature. A 1911 census return and a 2026 text message are the same thing to the definition.

The test is whether a living person can be identified from the record.

PIPEDA does not reach the archive kept at home and shown to relatives. Sorting photographs into boxes, scanning letters for your own use, lending an album to a cousin: none of that is commercial activity. The Act was not written to look inside a family.

The OPC overview describes a law aimed at organizations.

Two limits follow. First, government institutions fall under their own statutes. Library and Archives Canada, the Archives of Ontario and BC Archives are public bodies, so their handling of records you donate is governed by public-sector law, not by PIPEDA. Your obligations and theirs are different questions.

Second, provincially regulated employers are covered by provincial employment privacy rules rather than the federal Act. A family archivist is rarely an employer. A genealogy business with staff is a different case.

When a family archive becomes an organization

The trigger is commercial activity. Sell access to a database of transcribed registers, charge for research, publish a book for sale, or run a subscription newsletter built on family records, and you are likely an organization handling personal information.

The OPC's Privacy for businesses guidance is written for exactly that situation.

Money is the clearest signal, not the only one. A volunteer group that charges a membership fee and shares personal information as part of that activity sits in the same position as a business. The question is whether handling records is tied to a commercial purpose, however modest.

A grey zone opens when a private archive becomes semi-public. A public tree open to anyone, a Facebook page, a blog carrying advertising. Ad revenue can make an activity commercial even when the records themselves are given away.

The decision rule is this. If money or advertising touches the records, treat the whole collection as organizational data and apply the three duties listed at the top of this page. If you cannot tell whether money or advertising is involved, apply them anyway.

Starting a family archive means deciding what you will share, with whom, and on what terms.

Living people named in letters and photographs

The privacy interest in a letter belongs to the writer, the recipient, and anyone else named in it. A photograph of a living person is personal information about that person, even when your grandfather held the camera.

A parish register entry names a child, two parents and two witnesses. Each has a claim on how that entry is used while they are alive.

Death changes the picture. The OPC treats information about deceased individuals as generally outside the Act, though some provincial laws extend protection for a period after death. Quebec's private-sector law has been read to protect information about deceased persons in some circumstances.

So records naming only people who have died usually sit outside PIPEDA. Records naming living people sit inside it.

Mixed records are the common problem. A 1950s photograph may show four people, two of them alive. A letter may discuss a living grandchild beside a deceased aunt. Treat the record as containing personal information about the living people named. You do not have to redact the dead.

Sensitive information attracts more care. Health details, sexual orientation, religious belief, financial circumstances and information about minors sit at the higher end of the sensitivity scale. A hospital letter naming a living patient is not a wedding invitation. The OPC expects protection in proportion to sensitivity, and a family archivist applying that instinct will not go far wrong.

The test is simple. Who could be identified from this record, and are any of them alive? Yes means the record needs handling rules. No means it is history in the ordinary sense.

Publishing, donating and the consent that holds up

Publishing is where family archivists most often cross the line. A family history sold through a print-on-demand service is a commercial publication. A memoir with a print run and a price is a commercial publication. A free PDF on a blog carrying advertising may be one too.

Consent is the usual answer, and it has to be real. Asking a living relative whether their letter can appear in your book, and writing down the answer, is consent. Assuming they would not mind is not.

Where a record names several living people, you need consent from each, or a defensible reason to publish without it, such as a legal obligation or a journalistic purpose. Confirm the current requirements with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner or a lawyer before you publish.

Donating shifts handling to the institution, but it does not erase the question. Library and Archives Canada, the Archives of Ontario, BC Archives and Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec all take donor agreements, and many include access conditions for records naming living people.

A closure period, often expressed in years, is the common arrangement. Negotiate that clause rather than accepting the default.

Sharing is the widest category. Uploading a photograph to a public tree, posting a transcription in a forum, sending a database to a distant cousin. Once a record is public it is effectively permanent, and no retention schedule pulls it back. A detection and containment checklist approach works here: find the exposure, limit it, record what you did.

A worked example: 300 letters, 1948 to 1972

Suppose you inherit 300 letters and want to publish a selection. The sequence below is the one that survives scrutiny.

Step four is the one people skip. A letter that is closed today may be publishable in ten years, and the note is what tells your successor which is which.

Consent, collection and retention at a kitchen table

Consent under PIPEDA must be informed and tied to a purpose. Tell people what you are collecting, why, who will see it, and how long you will keep it. A one-page note sent to relatives before a scanning project does more good than a legal form nobody reads.

Collection should be limited to what you need. Scanning every document in a box because sorting is harder is collection without a purpose. Deciding you are building a record of one branch of the family, and scanning accordingly, is collection with one.

Retention needs an end point. PIPEDA expects destruction or anonymisation once information is no longer needed for the purpose it was collected.

A family archive can set its own schedule: unedited scans of records naming living people are held until the person dies or consents to wider sharing, then released or destroyed. Write the rule down so the next custodian follows it.

Access matters too. A living person named in your records can ask what you hold about them and ask for correction.

In practice that is a cousin asking for a copy of a letter, and the sensible response is to send it.

Refusing access is a position you should be able to justify, and a written log makes that easier.

Storage and privacy arrive together. Records kept in one shared condition are easier to find and easier to close when consent is withdrawn.

Provincial laws and where they differ

Canada has no single private-sector privacy law. The OPC maintains an overview of privacy laws in Canada and a summary comparing their reach. Read both before deciding which law governs your project.

Alberta's Personal Information Protection Act, British Columbia's Personal Information Protection Act and Quebec's private-sector law are deemed substantially similar to PIPEDA. Inside those provinces they replace the federal Act for organizations operating there.

Ontario, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador and the territories have no general private-sector statute of this kind, so PIPEDA applies to commercial activity in those places.

Health records are separate almost everywhere. Ontario, Alberta, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec all have health privacy statutes covering records held by custodians. A family archive holding a living person's medical letters may find that health law, not PIPEDA, sets the standard, depending on who holds the record and why.

Public-sector archives sit under their own statutes. Library and Archives Canada operates under the Library and Archives of Canada Act, provincial archives under provincial legislation, with access and privacy rules written into those Acts. When you donate, the donor agreement is where your wishes meet that framework.

Quebec is the strictest regime in the country, with consent requirements, confidentiality by default and privacy impact assessments that go further than PIPEDA. Publishing in Quebec, or about Quebec residents, means assuming a higher standard.

A short checklist before you publish or donate

Work through this before anything leaves the house. Conservation basics matter less here than governance.

Two habits make the list work. Keep a consent log with dates and conditions, because memory is not a record. Review that log when anyone named dies or asks for a change, since the privacy picture shifts with each death and each request.

Item five is easier to judge if you know how institutions set access terms on the collections they take in. That is the subject of family archives buying, which is why the cross-check belongs here.

Common questions

Can I publish my grandmother's letters without asking the people named in them?

If the letters name living people and you are publishing commercially, you need their consent or a defensible reason to proceed without it. Letters naming only people who have died are generally outside PIPEDA. Confirm your position with the OPC or a lawyer.

Which law applies if I live in Alberta or British Columbia?

Both provinces have private-sector privacy laws deemed substantially similar to PIPEDA. For commercial activity inside the province, the provincial law generally applies instead of the federal Act.

What happens to privacy when I donate records to an archive?

The institution takes on handling obligations under its own governing statute. Your room to negotiate is the donor agreement, where you can set a closure period for records naming living people.