You are being watched. It’s not a person looking at you, speaking into a headset, it’s not an overhead motion activated camera tracking with a flashing red recording light. No, it’s none of that cool looking stuff you see in movies. If you use a computer for work, your employee can install or may have installed employee monitoring software.These products do everything from tracking your keystrokes, sites you visit, taking screen shots every 3 minutes and text alerts to management when certain key words are used. Do data privacy and regulations prohibit this or are they a false sense of security?
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union and the European Economic Area that went into effect in May of 2018. The State of California passed a similar law, California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) that that takes effect in 2020. GDPR says
“Personal data shall be collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes.”
This does not prevent employee monitoring in that it is for a specific purpose to measure productivity and ensure people are doing what they are paid to do. GDPR does not restrict employee monitoring software.
My blog posts can be a call to action, a warning, or informational. This post is informative. Does your company use employee monitoring software? Chances are, you don’t know and that is on purpose. So, as you go through your tasks this week, think about your digital trail? What are you informing your employer about yourself?
Balancing on Unstable Surfaces 