📢 New features & changes
👤
← Back to home

Guide: assess your public website's technical posture in the context of Quebec's privacy law (Law 25)

Loi25.certi360.com offers a guided readout of your public website: domain name, secure connection, settings visible to the browser, cookies, and privacy policy wording. The goal is to help you see what a typical visitor can observe.

The service is not legal advice and does not certify compliance with Quebec's privacy law (Law 25) or any other law. It provides a factual baseline for internal discussion.

What is Quebec's privacy law (Law 25)?

Quebec's privacy law (Law 25) modernizes the province's personal information framework. It strengthens transparency, consent, security, and accountability obligations for organizations.

The main phases took effect in September 2022, September 2023, and September 2024. In 2022, several immediate obligations around governance and confidentiality incidents began to apply. In 2023, organizations were expected to make privacy notices easier to access, strengthen impact-assessment practices, and clearly designate the person responsible for personal information protection. In 2024, further expectations followed, including mechanisms related to portability and better circulation of information for individuals.

In practice, that means documenting data practices more carefully, explaining processing more clearly, overseeing vendors and hosts, and applying proportionate safeguards. Penalties can be significant: depending on the legal pathway, figures up to CA$25 million or 4% of worldwide turnover are part of the framework often discussed around the law.

Who is this tool for?

The service is aimed at any organization that wants a structured technical readout of its public website: IT (information technology) teams, privacy leads, consultants, or decision-makers. For an IT team, it can quickly surface technical gaps, external dependencies, and likely priority fixes. For a privacy lead, it provides a factual basis to document hosting, trackers, public-facing notices, and what a visitor can actually observe. For consultants and decision-makers, it helps frame the right questions, prioritize follow-up work, and track how a site evolves over time.

The output is a shared factual baseline, not a final legal position.

How to read the results

After a scan, each category shows a percentage and a colour: green when observed checks are broadly favourable, amber (orange / yellow) when some items need attention, and red when marked technical gaps are detected.

The percentage summarizes the observable checks that were run, not full legal compliance. A higher score mainly means fewer technical issues were seen in the tested areas; a lower score draws attention to concrete problems or missing public information.

A practical reading order is: red first (blocking or risky issues), amber next (hardening, documentation, incomplete settings), green last (maintenance and monitoring). For example, an expired certificate, no visible banner while non-essential trackers are active immediately, or no clearly found privacy policy would usually come before a CSP (Content Security Policy) that is only partially optimized or a DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) record still in monitoring mode. Conversely, a green result does not remove the need for follow-up, because a hosting change, marketing tag, or site redesign can quickly change what these tests observe. The detailed report then explains what was seen, often gives an example result, and helps separate urgent fixes from items that are mainly about internal documentation.