Striking a Balance – Interests of Employers and Privacy Expectations of Employees

10 December 2019

The Article 29 Working Party (WP29) published an assessment of the balance between legitimate interests of employers and the reasonable privacy expectations of employee. It outlines the risk assessment posed by modern working practices where new technologies enable more systematic processing of employees’ personal data at work, bringing privacy and data protection challenges.

Processing of personal data on the use of online services and location data from a smart device are much less visible to employees than other more traditional types, such as overt CCTV cameras, yet they encapsulate our lives more so.

Working from home is more commonplace nowadays, as well as during travel to and from the office. This means that monitoring activities outside of the physical working environment can take place and can potentially include monitoring of the individual in a private context. We often hear stories of the witless employee who phoned in sick and then posted Facebook photos of their seaside day out.

But it doesn't just end there.

More and more, employers are able to check on their staff during work time. However, it is important that the defining lines are not blurred so that the employee's private life is not also infringed (bearing in mind the right to a private and family life under Article 8 ECHR) and the storage of that employee's data is not beyond that which is necessary (bearing in mind the right of the data subject to 'be forgotten' (Vidal-Hall v Google) or ‘erasure’ under GDPR).

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