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Ask HN: Employee location tracking and GDPR/data protection
My employer (in the UK) has taken a hard stance on RTO, and they're tracking it with in office day % targets at a team level.
They have created a mobile application which lets you:
- see a map of all desks, which is clickable to show who is logged in at a particular desk, their name and photo and whether they are online/away/busy
- look up where a person is sat, or whether they are working from home
Any member of staff can access it at any time so it is starting to be used as a way to see how long individuals (as opposed to the team) are present and whether they are coming in for more than the required number of days.
My question is not so much whether employers can collect this data, but if they are allowed to share it with all other employees? I thought that this counts as "personal data" and there would be controls on who should be able to look at it.
- Nextgrid 5y agoYou might be overthinking this - anyone who's in the office can already know who else is in there and for how long, so I don't believe making that information available digitally actually reveals any more data - if someone wanted to keep tabs on people they could just as well do it with the old system by coming into the office and looking around.
- aabbccddeeffgg 5y agoHmm. It's like the difference between that and CCTV. I'm fine with other people seeing me, I don't want to have cameras watching me 24/7.
- rantallion 5y agoIf CCTV inside a business's premises are okay, you're going to have a hard time arguing that any other surveillance is unlawful. They're not storing or sharing anything personal about you that you haven't already granted them permission to store (if you have a work badge with your photo on, you already consented to them storing a likeness of your image for identification purposes). As much as I empathise with you on your stance against RTO, there's nothing here to fight.