Worker Privacy in a Digitalized World Under European Law

Abstract

The aim of this contribution is to map privacy and related issues of the digitalized and robotized workplace. In order to provide an overview of the major issues at stake, we present four scenarios in this article that can currently be observed in some modern workplaces. These scenarios concern chip implants, social media assessments of prospective employees, algorithmic assessments of employee performance, and health assessments via wearables. Each of these four scenarios is discussed from a data protection and privacy point of view. We show how the increased use of data and technologies in the workplace challenge some key data protection principles. We particularly focus on three of these principles: the principle of lawfulness, the principle of purpose limitation, and the principle of fairness. While we admit that the analysis of workers’ data has a big potential to improve the overall performance of a company, we argue that data protection principles should be adhered to nevertheless. This is important because protection of data and individual privacy is also instrumental to many other rights such as personal liberty, dignity, equality, fairness, and justice. Furthermore, in the long term, insufficiently observing privacy and data protection may erode (minimum levels of) trust between employers and employees. Such trust is necessary for employees to focus on their work (rather than on their safety and their position), which is in turn beneficial for employers.