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The Italian data protection authority issued a decision against a company that had adopted a video survaillance system also allowing the audio survaillance of employees of a call center.
Indeed, the Italian Worker’s Bill of Rights prohibits tools aimed at the remote monitoring of workers which can be allowed only if required by organization and productive or security needs with the prior agreement with trade unions. On the contrary, in this particular case, such prior agreement had not been reached and according to the the data protection authority there were no organization or productive needs justifying such measures.
Additionally, the persons having access to the data collected through the video/audio survaillance system had not been appointed as data processors or persons in charge of the data processing as required by Italian data protection law.
Given the above, the data protection authority prohibited the usage of the images collected through the video/audio survaillance system and consequently even if the company had collected evidence of a potential unlawful conduct of some of his employees (e.g. the disclosure of confidential information) through the system they would be prevented from using them in a potential dispute or in order to dismiss an employee. Also, the case has been reported to court authorities and the company might face relevant fines and potentially criminal penalties.
The above applies also to the systems aimed at monitoring e-mails and Internet usage where – in absence a policy drafted in compliance with the guidelines issued by the Italian data protection authority – an employer would not be in the position to challenge employees unlawful conducts even if it has evidence of it and any access to employees’ emails or data on Internet usage would be unlawful even if there is a grounded suspect of an unlawful conduct.
Do you want to know more about the above? Feel free to contact me, Giulio Coraggio.
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