Consent documents

A consent document is the disclosure (P-39.1 s. 8; A-2.1 s. 65) the person concerned reads and consents under. In the application, it lives under the menu Information and consent > Forms. It is the text that makes consent informed: it states which information is collected, for which purposes, by which means, how long it is retained, how to withdraw consent, and to whom the information may be communicated.

#Anatomy of a document

A document carries a code, a name, a version, an effective date (date d'entrée en vigueur), a status, and a list of items: the catalog cells it groups.

The disclosure fields are bilingual (French and English):

• Purposes (fins): the purposes the information is collected for.
• Means of collection (moyens de collecte; P-39.1 s. 8, first paragraph, subparagraph 2; A-2.1 s. 65, first paragraph, subparagraph 3): the means by which the information is collected.
• Categories: the categories of personal information involved.
• Retention (conservation): how long and how the information is retained.
• Withdrawal of consent (retrait du consentement): how the person concerned can withdraw consent.
• Recipients (destinataires): to whom the information may be communicated.
• Mandatory or optional nature and consequences of a refusal: for a public body only (A-2.1 s. 65, first paragraph, subparagraphs 4 and 5).
• Cross-border communication (communication hors Québec): communication of information outside Québec, where applicable (this field may be null when there is no cross-border communication).
• Rights: the rights of the person concerned.
• Responsible person (responsable): the name and contact details of the privacy officer.
• Automated decision and profiling: a flag and a text, when the disclosure covers a decision based exclusively on automated processing or an identification, location or profiling function. They are composed from the cells flagged in the catalog.

#Creating and editing

To create a form, you pick the catalog cells it groups and say whether there is communication outside Québec. The application composes the draft right away from your registers (see below). If a source is missing, the draft is still created and its page says exactly what to complete.

You then edit the draft as one text per language, each section starting with its title between double asterisks. Keep those titles: they file the text under the right heading, and the application refuses a text that has lost one or that puts text before the first title.

#Editable draft, immutable published version

A document has two states that matter. A draft is editable: until it is published, you freely adjust its text and items. A published version is immutable. A version superseded by a newer one moves to archived and is kept for the receipts that cite it.

To change a published document you do not reopen it: you create a new version, which clones the published version into a new draft. You edit that draft, then publish it in turn. The old version stays intact, frozen as it was for the people who consented under it.

#Publishing: material or minor change

When a new version replaces another, the application compares it with the previous one and proposes to classify the change as material or minor: any substantive change is proposed as material. You confirm or correct that classification on the review page before publishing. Every supersession is recorded, a minor classification included, with the number of people who would have been solicited and who decided.

A material change opens a re-consent campaign: Agreely generates one re-consent link per person concerned still attached to the previous version. The campaign page lets you download those links as a CSV, indexed by your customer id, and record that the notice of the change was disseminated.

#Assisted generation of a draft

The app can generate a draft disclosure from the structured sources you have already entered:

• the grouped catalog cells feed the purposes and the categories;
• the retention rules feed retention;
• cross-border communication and its PIAs feed the communication outside Québec section;
• the processors and providers register and the outside-Québec transfers register feed the recipients;
• the privacy officer feeds the contact details.

Generation is gated, not one-click magic. It hard-blocks when the sources are incomplete and shows you the list of missing sources to fill before you can proceed. Regenerating rewrites the sections from your registers, except the means of collection and the recipients you edited by hand, which stay as they are; a separate button replaces the recipients list with the one composed from your registers. If a generated draft no longer matches its sources (a cell added, a rule changed, a person in charge replaced), publishing stops on a review page that names the drift. And above all, the human review of the text, ideally with legal counsel, is yours before any publish.

#PDF and IPFS anchoring

A published version can be downloaded as a PDF on the company side, and it is pinned to IPFS. Its CID (content identifier) is shown in the form's Integrity tab, with its state per version: recorded as anchored, on IPFS (pinned, not yet anchored) or none.

For the detail of pinning, CID computation, and document integrity, see IPFS document integrity.

#Next

• The catalog: the (category, purpose) cells a document groups.
• Consent requests: issuing an offer under a published version.
• IPFS document integrity: CID pinning and verification, protocol-side.