Is the law not keeping up with employee monitoring technology? Their privacy may suffer

The Labor Protection Council operating at the Sejm drew attention to new forms of monitoring that regulations cannot keep up with. When creating regulations on employee protection, it was impossible to take into account advanced modern technologies. Experts drew attention to this problem, even though the current regulations were established in 2018, which may seem a relatively recent date. This shows how quickly changes in this field are progressing today.

Employee monitoring. Regulations don’t keep up with technology?

At that time, the regulations in question related almost exclusively to video surveillance and employee e-mail monitoring. Nowadays, the catalog of control tools is, of course, much wider. Employee activity in IT systems and computer work time are supervised, and company vehicles are also tracked via GPS systems. Artificial intelligence also analyzes user behavior in IT systems and analyzes work efficiency.

The Ministry of Family, Labor and Social Policy responded to questions from “Dziennik Gazeta Prawna” regarding the above issues and said that it did not see any need to change the regulations. It assured that the applicable law was “technologically neutral”, i.e. it defined general principles that could also be applied to new tools. Detailing the law, according to the ministry, would lead to its obsolescence much faster.

However, legal counsel Karolina Kukielska, who deals with data protection at ODO24, does not agree with this position. – The regulations on monitoring at work definitely need to be updated – she emphasized in an interview with the newspaper. In her opinion, the lack of transparent rules creates uncertainty on the part of employers and authorities assessing individual situations.

Employee monitoring? Employers themselves have doubts

Legal advisor Paweł Sych, managing partner of the personal data protection team at the PCS Paruch Chruściel Stępień Kanclerz law firm, agrees with the emphasis on general principles. However, he notes that this does not rule out the need for changes to the regulations. As he explained with examples, many employers have doubts whether the solutions they use are subject to current regulations.

The existence of the problem was also confirmed by Justyna Tyc-Brzosko, counsel, legal advisor in the Labor and Social Insurance Law Practice of the DZP law firm. – The lack of detailed regulations leaves employers with a wide range of monitoring measures, which often leads to the collection of too much data and violation of employees’ rights, e.g. the right to privacy – she noted.

The solution was proposed by Michał Kibil, managing partner at the DGTL law firm. He said that clear interpretative guidelines would be helpful. Thanks to this, it would be known how to interpret the standards to quickly adapt them to the “dynamically changing
reality.”