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This is illegal without employee consent in the EU and in most other civilized countries around the world.

dsyrk 5y ago
Can you provide a reference for that? I am logging the employee’s use of the corporate computer system that they don’t own and are being paid to work on. That is total nonsense it can be illegal, there is zero legal expectation of any privacy on a private companies computer systems. Why in the world should there be?
- gpm 5y ago
  In the EU, what you are claiming you do is illegal under the GDPR, you would be required to give prior notice at the very least. See the "notice" section starting at bottom 3 of this for the lay persons summary on the notice requirement (or read the whole thing to see what laws around this look like in Germany) https://www.bakermckenzie.com/-/media/files/people/lutz-holger/ar_germany_employeemonitoring_2019.pdf?la=en https://www.bakermckenzie.com/-/media/files/people/lutz-holg...
  - dsyrk 5y ago
    Let’s pretend that the employee agreement doesn’t explicitly tell them that they should have no expectation of privacy and all their activities on the company computer system is monitored. It’s still not even remotely illegal under the laws in Germany according to your reference and my understanding. People are confusing video, audio, and communication surveillance with monitoring or surveillance of use of the computer. Of course governments have laws to protect privacy, they don’t want companies reading your private emails or text messages or taking pictures of you or recording your conversations, all while you were unaware. Notice for all that to be legal you just have to clearly notify them so they can potentially not consent, probably almost always can be fired if they don’t anyway. The idea that a WFH remote access system that monitors if the employee is actually using the system and that monitoring is used by managers to review if the employee actually did WFH or not is somehow privacy invading is ridiculous. The most interesting part of this whole discussion is the intense reaction of people. We kinda know there are a whole bunch of HN reeders who are suddenly freaking out when they consider their manager/boss might be able to see what I’m describing, and tbh there really might be some who can, it’s very likely.

Can you provide a reference for that? I am logging the employee’s use of the corporate computer system that they don’t own and are being paid to work on. That is total nonsense it can be illegal, there is zero legal expectation of any privacy on a private companies computer systems. Why in the world should there be?

gpm 5y ago
In the EU, what you are claiming you do is illegal under the GDPR, you would be required to give prior notice at the very least. See the "notice" section starting at bottom 3 of this for the lay persons summary on the notice requirement (or read the whole thing to see what laws around this look like in Germany) https://www.bakermckenzie.com/-/media/files/people/lutz-holger/ar_germany_employeemonitoring_2019.pdf?la=en https://www.bakermckenzie.com/-/media/files/people/lutz-holg...
- dsyrk 5y ago
  Let’s pretend that the employee agreement doesn’t explicitly tell them that they should have no expectation of privacy and all their activities on the company computer system is monitored. It’s still not even remotely illegal under the laws in Germany according to your reference and my understanding. People are confusing video, audio, and communication surveillance with monitoring or surveillance of use of the computer. Of course governments have laws to protect privacy, they don’t want companies reading your private emails or text messages or taking pictures of you or recording your conversations, all while you were unaware. Notice for all that to be legal you just have to clearly notify them so they can potentially not consent, probably almost always can be fired if they don’t anyway. The idea that a WFH remote access system that monitors if the employee is actually using the system and that monitoring is used by managers to review if the employee actually did WFH or not is somehow privacy invading is ridiculous. The most interesting part of this whole discussion is the intense reaction of people. We kinda know there are a whole bunch of HN reeders who are suddenly freaking out when they consider their manager/boss might be able to see what I’m describing, and tbh there really might be some who can, it’s very likely.