Employer spying on employee

IMC2

A friend has told me of a colleague who is being disiplined for being abroad while they were off sick.

The way in which they got caught was the company had tracked there location on their person phone as they had an app on their phone which was logged into their company email account.

I know that employers can track you on company provided devices.

But what is rules around person phone, tablets, laptops, etc?

Me personally I would have thought this would be a breach of privacy and illegal but I can't really find anything online about this.

Does anyone know what legality of this is?

El_Torro

If your friend downloaded the app and gave it permission to access their location then I don't think the employer has done anything wrong here.

BrassicWoman

In a "who is the most wrong" contest, the one with access to the best lawyers wins.

Grumpy_chap

IMC2 said:

A friend has told me of a colleague who is being disiplined for being abroad while they were off sick.

The way in which they got caught was the company had tracked there location on their person phone as they had an app on their phone which was logged into their company email account.

I know that employers can track you on company provided devices.

But what is rules around person phone, tablets, laptops, etc?

Me personally I would have thought this would be a breach of privacy and illegal but I can't really find anything online about this.

Does anyone know what legality of this is?

Hard to really say here as this is all third-hand (or more) information - the colleague of a friend...

Based on what has been said, it would seem to be that the employee has been caught bang-to-rights.  There could be a lot more detail that would change that.

The whole issue may not be just down to the apparent "holiday while sick" headline - there could be GDPR issues against the employee as much as the employer tracking the location.

Let's start by looking at the "abroad while off sick":

1. Was the individual sick (actually ill)?
2. Was the individual claiming sickness time from work?
3. Was the individual abroad during this time?
4. Where in the vastness of abroad?  
5. Why was the individual abroad?
6. What did the individual first respond when challenged by the employer?

At the two extremes here we have "sorry guvnor, you've got me, I should not have done it, very silly of me, really sorry that I was on the beach in Spain while claiming to be ill" right through to the other end "I was ill and travelled to unheard of place in Turkey for medical treatment I could not get in UK."

The let's consider the mobile device tracking:

1. Was the company app on the individual's device with authorisation?
2. Did the individual know the app could track location?

It is entirely possible here that the individual has broken company rules by having the app on private device and / or taking the app (hence data) outside the UK - breach of security protocols, possible data breach by the individual.
Against that, the individual wants to claim that the company breached the individual's privacy by being tracked.

I think in many companies, this type of event would result in dismissal so if the individual can escape with only a disciplinary, they will have done well.  
Countering with issues around the privacy or tracking versus the quagmire of the individual having possibly breached data security, this is probably not a route to be followed.

If this were me, I'd be looking for damage limitation, try to keep my job for the while, and look for a new job.

BrassicWoman

Also depends what you are sick with. Sometimes a holiday will help recovery.

theoretica

There are, of course, many sicknesses which would leave someone unable to work, but fine to be abroad.  Someone with a physical job and a broken arm for instance.  Or poor mental health.  Jumping to the question of monitoring seems to be acknowledgement that the employee was indeed wrong to be abroad - is that part of their contract? 

IMC2

Why the employee was off sick and where they went abroad I'm not entirely sure.

If they get sacked or get a warming, it makes no difference to me.

It's more the employee having there location checked on there personal phone I found more worrying.

My friend did say that all staff can access company emails on personal devices and a lot of them have now deleted this app. It was either microsoft outlook or Gmail, not a company specific application.

I know these days when downloading any app they ask to track you location. But by default granting the employeer the ability to view your location, and track any of member of staff on a personal device, without this really clarified seems a little disingenuous to me.

elsien

My golden rule is always to keep personal and work life apart. That includes work having no access whatsoever to my personal mobile or my personal computer, and making sure my social media does not include anyone from work and is locked down as tightly as it is possible to get.

Anyone you share your data with, whether work or anything else, you should be thinking really carefully about the implications. 

400ixl

If it was a half decent IT department, then to register a work account it would have forced a device management suite such as Intune which creates a sandbox for work data and set the company as the administrator for the sandbox. This would have come with warnings that this means the company gets granted access to certain information of which one would be location.

Even if it was a poor implementation and just allowed, there will most likely have been T&C's in the company that installing work applications on personal devices gives them certain rights.

Only if they had neglected to have any sort of implicit or explicit conditions could they be deemed in any way to be doing anything illegal.

As for the being abroad when sick, that is an entirely different topic. Every company I have worked for has had a condition that they must be informed and permission sought if you want to travel abroad whilst off sick.

If this condition is in place here then they are within their rights to take action.

Provided they put the right conditions in place then what the OP describes is totally legal.

Mr.Generous

It would have been any lie told to the company about the absence, rather than the fact the employee was abroad when I was having to deal with this kind of thing.

"Breached the trust that must exist between the company and its employees" being a typical gross misconduct.

Savvy_Sue

Remember that the employer doesn't need to 'prove' anything in this situation, they just need 'a reasonable belief'.

How they came to hold that belief probably doesn't matter. They believe the employee was abroad while signed off work. If the employee didn't engage with the employer to say they planned to go abroad, and justify why this was compatible with why they were off sick and might even aid recovery, the employee is in deep doodah.

Worrying about privacy is displacement. If it hadn't been the app, it could have been the sunburn, the FB post, the chance comment to a colleague, the invitation to a meeting to discuss the absence ...