Personal information
Personal information is any information about an identifiable individual — anything that, alone or combined with other data, could identify a specific person.
Under Canada’s federal PIPEDA, personal information is defined broadly as *“information about an identifiable individual.”* Quebec’s Law 25 uses a similar test: information is personal if it *“allows a person to be identified,”* directly or indirectly. This covers obvious identifiers (name, address, email, phone) and less obvious ones (IP address, device ID, location, purchase history) whenever they can be linked back to someone.
Business contact information used purely to reach an employee at work (name, title, work email) is treated more leniently under PIPEDA, but the moment data is used to build a profile of a person, it is personal information.
Because the test is *identifiability*, the same data point can be personal in one context and not in another. See the Office of the Privacy Commissioner’s guidance for how Canadian regulators apply the definition.
