Would you let your employer track your location 24/7?
A California woman reacts to a former employer who wanted to keep tabs on her around the clock.
A woman is suing her former employer after she was dismissed after deleting a smartphone app (not shown here) that allows her managers to track her location 24 hours a day.
Karly Domb Sadof/AP/File
Refusing to allow her employer to track her movements when off the clock allegedly got Myrna Arias, an employee at a California money transferring firm, fired after she uninstalled a GPS enabled tracking app her employer required her to keep on at all times.
One concern over such monitoring is that it may led to what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) calls 聽by an employer.
鈥淲hen employers monitor someone鈥檚 personal life, that allows them to gather up a lot of information about how they live their lives,鈥� says Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU in New York in an interview. 鈥淎re they sexually active? Are they gay? Do they smoke?鈥�
Ms. Arias didn鈥檛 want her employer to have that kind of access to her personal life. After being fired, she is now suing her former employer, , for allegedly violating her privacy, wrongful termination and other allegations. Intermex, based in Miami, Florida, did not return phone calls for comment.
The , filed with a California court, states that Ms. Arias was required by her employer to keep her phone on at all times and was dismissed weeks after being "scolded" for uninstalling the app workforce tracking application on her phone.
In the complaint, her superiors at Intermex claimed that the phone was to be kept on 24/7 in order to field calls from clients and not specifically for tracking purposes.
According to the Xora (soon to be known as ClickSoftware) website, is meant to assist employers with mobile employees who may require data, guidance or to file time cards, mileage, job assignments and other paperwork directly from their smartphones.
"[Arias' boss John] Stubits admitted that employees would be monitored while off duty, and bragged that he knew how fast she was driving at specific moments ever since she had installed the app on her phone," according to the聽.
Alan Butler, senior (EPIC) in Washington, D.C., says in an interview with the Monitor that while some employers may have legitimate reasons for monitoring and tracking an employee鈥檚 whereabouts, this is a case where the employer went too far.
鈥淲hen an employer is tracking their employees鈥� movements completely unrelated to any work function, that is completely inappropriate,鈥� Mr. Butler says. 鈥淭he fact that these applications exist is no excuse for people to use them for harassment or other inappropriate ends. An employer is not justified in firing an employee聽simply聽because they don鈥檛 want to submit to 24/7 location monitoring."
Stanley, of the ACLU in New York, points out in an interview that invasive employee monitoring is really not new 鈥� it's just becoming easier and harder to avoid as technology advances.
鈥淚t began with [auto magnate] Henry Ford hiring detectives to spy on employees,鈥� Mr. Stanley says.
According to the Jalopnik website, wanted to insure that workers who had made promises to live in a way that conformed with Ford鈥檚 principles remained worthy of their conditional pay raises.
Richard Snow writes in his book, "," as quoted on Jalopnik, 鈥淭o qualify for his doubled salary, the worker had to be thrifty and continent. He had to keep his home neat and his children healthy, and, if he were below the age of twenty-two, to be married.鈥�
Butler adds that today鈥檚 Intermex case 鈥渉ighlights the fact that we don鈥檛 have any comprehensive legislation, certainly not on the federal level, in the United States dealing with location tracking issues.鈥�
鈥淭here are increasingly more ways to track people鈥檚 locations and applications like this and they鈥檙e becoming more and more invasive and we haven鈥檛 addressed that,鈥� he says.
However, Stanley explained that the ACLU has not done much work on employer terrorist attacks, which resulted in a myriad of changes in the legality of surveillance and privacy.
The last document the ACLU produced on the subject was in 1999, titled .
鈥淕enerally our position is that while employers do have the right to monitor workers to insure they are being good employees, what we have seen all too often is that electronic surveillance, just because it鈥檚 so easy goes too far,鈥� Stanley says. 鈥淲orkplace monitoring is something that should be narrowly tailored. It shouldn鈥檛 create an atmosphere of pervasive intimidation or surveillance.鈥�