Employee Surveillance

The matter of employee surveillance is a very delicate subject within the workplace and comes in various forms. It is subject to various Acts of Parliament and practice recommendations including Lawful Business Practice Regulations contained within The Telecommunications (Lawful Business Practice) (Interception of Communications) Regulations 2000, the Data Protection Act 1998 and perhaps most importantly the Human Rights Act 1998 which provides individuals with certain rights of privacy.

More and more company vehicles are fitted with tracking devices, although predominantly this is done with safety and security in mind (an explanation often given for overt surveillance within a building by means of cameras).

However, increasingly the monitoring is by more covert methods, such as the monitoring of e-mails, both internal and external, and of telephone calls. This is usually carried out to ensure acceptable levels of personal usage and to ensure that regulations relating to the contents of transmitted and received e-mails comply with company rules and statutory regulations. E-mails that are in poor taste, defamatory or libellous have, in the past, left the employer and employee open to civil and criminal proceedings. The employer's right to carry out such monitoring is usually inserted into employee’s contracts of employment.

Ensuring that employers have correctly followed the rules and regulations can prove vital when cases of impropriety or misconduct by members of staff come to light with regard to the retrieval and presentation of evidence to courts and tribunals.

The rights of employees to bring personal computers into the workplace and the provision of personal computers by employers can have an impact on any safeguards to protect intellectual property, as well as client lists and vital company information. A recent case brought that into focus when an employee left his job to work for a rival company, having copied client data and mailing lists. Knowing he was in possession of a lap-top computer of his own as well as a company owned machine (given up when he left his employers) meant that when forensic mirroring was carried out on all data devices, including machines in his new office, his own computer, found in the boot of his car, yielded additional evidence confirming his breach of the terms of his employment, and thus validating the termination of his contract of employment.