Ask most small business owners who is responsible for privacy at their company and you will get a shrug, or "our IT person, I think." Yet Canadian privacy law expects a named, accountable person for how you handle personal information, and under Quebec's Law 25 that role is now mandatory by default. The good news: for a small business, the Privacy Officer is usually someone you already have, not someone you need to hire. What matters is naming them, and giving the role real meaning.
What the law actually asks for
Two things drive this. Under federal PIPEDA, one of the ten fair information principles is accountability: an organization is responsible for personal information under its control and must designate an individual to be accountable for its privacy practices. That has been true for years, it is just widely ignored. Quebec's Law 25 made it sharper: the person exercising the highest authority (the CEO or owner) is the Privacy Officer by default, unless they formally delegate the role in writing to someone else. The title and contact details must also be published, typically on your website.
So the question is rarely "do we need one." Legally, you already have one, it defaults to whoever runs the company. The real question is whether you have named that person deliberately and given them the job, or whether the role is sitting unclaimed.
Who it should be
In a small business, the Privacy Officer does not need to be a lawyer or a full-time hire. It should be someone who: has enough authority to actually change how the business handles data, understands your operations well enough to know where personal information lives, and can be a clear point of contact. In practice that is often the owner, a general manager, an operations lead, or whoever already owns compliance and HR. Avoid defaulting it to your outsourced IT provider by reflex: they can support the technical side, but accountability for privacy decisions belongs inside the business.
What the role actually does
Stripped of jargon, a Privacy Officer makes sure someone is minding the personal information you hold. Day to day and over the year that means:
- Being the contact: the named person customers, regulators, or staff reach with a privacy question, a request to see or delete their data, or a complaint.
- Owning the basics: keeping your privacy policy honest and current, and knowing what personal data you collect and why.
- Handling requests and incidents: responding to access and deletion requests, and leading the response if personal information is exposed in a breach.
- Steering the program: making sure the pieces underneath, a privacy management program, retention, vendor checks, actually happen rather than living only on paper.
Naming one without over-engineering it
You can make this real in an afternoon. Decide who holds the role and put it in writing (even a short internal note delegating the responsibility is enough). Publish the title and a contact method, an email like privacy@yourcompany.ca works well, so it survives staff turnover. Give the person a simple standing task: know where personal data lives, keep the privacy policy accurate, and be reachable. That is a defensible starting point, and it is far more than most small businesses have.
The trap to avoid is treating this as a ceremonial title with nothing behind it. A named Privacy Officer who has never looked at what data you hold does not help you if a customer complains or a regulator asks. The point of the role is that a real person is paying attention.
When to get help
If you operate in Quebec, handle sensitive data (health, financial, children's information), or the person taking the role is unsure where to start, it is worth a short advisory session rather than guessing. The role itself stays with you, but scoping what it needs to cover, and building the light program underneath it, is exactly the kind of thing that is quick to get right with guidance and slow to untangle after a complaint.