Employers may be tracking you at home
REBECCA GREENFIELD Myrna Arias knew her professional life was monitored by her boss. As part of her sales job at Intermex, a wire transfer service, she had to install an app called Xora that uses GPS to keep tabs on her whereabouts as she drove around California’s Central Valley.
The tracking appears to have continued even when Arias was off the clock. A recently filed lawsuit alleges her manager “admitted that employees would be monitored while off duty.”
Arias claims her decision to uninstall the app resulted in her firing and her wrongful-termination lawsuit seeks more than $500,000 US in damages for lost wages and breach of privacy. Intermex declined to comment. Requiring employees to install GPS-enabled apps sounds slightly dystopian but it isn’t unusual. Tracking is especially prevalent in jobs where employees spend a lot of their workday on the road.
A report last year from Aberdeen Group found 54 per cent of companies that send employees out on service calls track the realtime location of workers, up from 37 per cent in a similar study from 2012.
Employers rely on tracking to improve safety and productivity. The data and analytics from a GPS can help fleets cut down on fuel costs. It’s also a great disciplinary tool: using company time and a company-owned vehicle to run an errand or take a nap? The boss will know.
Arias, who likens her employer’s alleged surveillance to anklebracelet monitoring for parolees, had reason to believe the tracking went beyond her 9-to-5 movements. The lawsuit alleges her boss required her company phone remain on at all times and even when inactive the app’s GPS ran in the background. Xora did not respond to questions on how the app works.
“Employers are entitled, if there is a legitimate business reason, to track,” Arias’s lawyer, Gail Glick, said in an interview. “What we’re saying is that you don’t have a right to track 24 hours a day.”
Even though it sounds like a caricature of Big Brother intrusion, GPS-based tracking of employees doesn’t necessarily overstep privacy boundaries, as a Wall Street Journal article from 2013 noted. Courts have found workers don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy when on the job. Your boss, for example, can read your work email. As long as employers can point to a work-related reason for the surveillance, courts tend to see the practice as fair game.
Those precious after-work hours, on the other hand, are sacred. “Employees absolutely have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their movements while they’re off duty,” said Lauren Teukolsky, a California attorney who specializes in labour issues.
In California, where Arias filed her case, workers have stronger privacy protections than in most other states. The state constitution has an explicit privacy protection that applies both to government and private sectors.
The Supreme Court has considered the limits of GPS tracking in a 2012 opinion that police had violated the Fourth Amendment by putting a monitoring device on a car without a warrant. The high court reaffirmed that view in a recent case.