Slashdot Mirror
Germany To Grant Privacy At the Workplace
An anonymous reader writes "The German government is proposing a bill declaring that employees have an expectation of privacy at the workplace (translated article). Among other provisions, the bill would ban employers from surveilling their employees by cameras or logging and reading their emails. Also, potential employers would not be allowed to view an applicant's profile at Facebook or any other social network that hasn't actually been made for this purpose."
Good thing for German workers.
That would be like me saying I can't put a GPS on my car to keep tabs on where it goes when my son drives it. If you're on facebook at work when you should be working, I think the employer has a right to know about it. Also, no cameras? So they can't utilize technology, but they're still allowed to stand behind you and watch you work, right? The only difference between the two is the technology behind the first one.
all the pron will be SFW, now!
Also, potential employers would not be allowed to view an applicant's profile at Facebook or any other social network that hasn't actually been made for this purpose.
How would they go about enforcing this? Couldn't an employer argue that any content on a social networking profile that someone makes available to the public, was made for everyone to see? Failing that, how do you prove when an employer looks at a public profile?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
This seems absurd... all my mail servers log employees' email every day. Even worse, my spam filters read the entire message to make sure it is acceptable- before allowing delivery to the employee. These privacy measures may sound great on paper, but not all will work. If IT cannot log emails, how do we troubleshoot email delivery problems? Of course, I may be taking this to the next level, completely ignoring the actual wording of the proposed law.
Per JFK, we're all covered. :-)
Trouble is, by regulating lots of nitty-gritty details instead of a broad "Constitutional right"-style protection, one makes it even harder for the law to keep up with progress - while exposing the loopholes most clearly to those determined to use them with impunity.
To quote Portalis, one of the masterminds behind the French Civil Code:
Warning: This profile is not to be looked at by lame employers!
Click yes if you are totally cool and not one of those lame employers.
How do they determine what is a private email or call versus private?
At my job (granted that is in the US,) if it is using company resources, then it is work related. I have to sign several papers agreeing to that when I am hired (and every year or so they make us sign it again.)
No, after a series of scandals (that went far beyond keeping employees from stealing or surfing all day), just no cameras e.g. in change rooms or rest rooms, where they wouldn't be allowed to stand in front of you and watch you undress etc. "IRL" either.
Also, no covert widespread phone surveillance or reading of private correspondence (if allowed on company premises/equipment in the first place) under the "excuse" that they'd need to find "moles" (celebrated as whistleblowers entitled to special protection in other jurisdictions).
The Facebook prong is an entirely different thing altogether: HR (or private investigators on their part, probably even "pre-emptively") shouldn't be allowed to intrude social networking sites as "false friends" to harvest dirt on (would-be) employees (not that anyone in their right mind should let that pile up there anyway).
The level of detail is not necessarily the wisest way to make law, though: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1762764&cid=33337514
Just looking at the "ban employers from surveilling their employees by cameras or logging and reading their emails" sections of the translated article, it's clear that it mentions banning cameras in traditionally private places such as wash rooms, but allowing open surveillance in areas where it makes a business/safety sense to do so, and I think it says telephone/email monitoring will be allowed (and probably required) based on regulations covering the industry in question; I see nothing about banning.
Your literal intepretation is unreasonable and silly.
The whole point is to avoid unreasonable monitoring. If the primary purporse of a camera is to monitor employees actions it would illegal.
However a camera installed to monitor the work place for safety reasons (such as a bank) would be perfectly legal.
The purpose and coverage area would determine the legality, and remember the employer would not be the one to decide the legality (or if the supposed "purpose" is in fact in violation of the law).
You realize companies in the US now ask you to login to Facebook during the interview?
That would be illegal in Germany and for good reasons!
Firstly usually automated "logging" for the express purpose of administration and automated work of server is always allowed. The specific purpose of reading email log in attempting to read the content one is not the destination is not allowed, depending on the firm type & Betriebsvereinbarung (Firm agreement ?). That is way different than how you read it. And yes I read the german article and know a bit on the local laws. Whoever modded you insightful did neither.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
If you want to prevent your employees from using facebook and similar sites, make it a firewall rule that redirects to a page clearly stating that it is blocked and be done with it. Also be sure to publish a clear acceptable use policy.
However, it is a violation of the rights of privacy for a prospective employer or existing employer to check out the facebook sites of either current or prospective employees.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
I slightly exaggerated the feebleness of a presumption of privacy.
In the relatively rare case where a corporation and an ex-employee end up in litigation, the advocate for the employee will now find it considerable easier to argue that copious employment surveillance records are inadmissible. In future, character assassination will be less thoroughly recorded in the annals of the German courts.
(With two 'ass'es in the previous sentence, it's no wonder my Firefox spell checker failed to suggest 'annals' in place of 'anals'. I once posted a bug report on some egregious defects in the Firefox spell checker speculating unkindly whether the verb list was scraped off the bottom of someone's shoe. The evidence mounts.)
You might believe an employer should have those rights, however here in Europe we actually believe in protecting and putting our citizens above corporations.
This is not the first example of Europeans placing more emphasis on citizens' rights than the US.
It is fascinating how even the average American believes that corporations are entitled to treat their employees as [wage] slaves! It's as if you think employees sell their dignity when they take a job!
In my country overtime is frowned upon, if you don't leave at the end of the day people will wonder why you haven't finished your tasks in time. Staying after hours is just seen as inefficient. So while we work fewer hours than the average American we're still more productive and efficient according to the OECD.
I think you're all semi-brainwashed by decades of anti-communist, nationalist [capitalist] propaganda. I hope it wears off soon for your own sakes, the average American could use some decent jobs, rights and protections. Contrary to popular American beliefs the United States of America is not the best country in the world.
Defense agencies and contractors in the US monitor all employee computer use, and I don't expect that to change here any time soon - and I don't really have a problem with it. Is this law going to apply to the German government as well?
SPONTANEOUS EVOLUTION, MAN!
The stories about privacy protections always seem to favor personal privacy in Europe, but to favor privacy invasion in the US. How do Europeans get better protection? European government looks a lot more bureaucratic and controlled access than even the US, which I would think would favor industry which has the time and money to ensure privacy can be abused for power and profit. Maybe it's because the protections begin at the state level, which is more accessible than the EU as a whole, while in the US state privacy protections aren't as powerful as Federal protections for invading them, or just a vacuum of protections at the Federal level. Or maybe EU privacy orgs are just more effective, perhaps better funded, than the US ones like EFF. Or maybe we just get the news of only privacy protection from EU, not privacy abuse, while in the US we get the abuse news so we're conditioned to accept it.
How do Europeans do it? I'm jealous.
--
make install -not war
Many of these protections are already in place in the US and Europe is just catching up. For example, US employers have been limited for years in how they can use social networking sites, based on existing US non-discrimination and privacy laws. Many of those restrictions in the US are based on case law; they don't require separate legislation. In Europe, legislators need to pass many more explicit laws, and a lot of that is knee-jerk reactions to recent events and populist legislation that sounds good on the surface but that nobody knows how it's going to work out in the long run.
And you're also right that a lot of European privacy abuse just isn't reported on much in the US. For example, the law in the story was prompted by several huge scandals in which big German companies spied on their employees, again in ways that are already totally illegal under US law.
Other European privacy abuses aren't even perceived as such in Europe; people are just used to a more intrusive government. Many other European privacy abuses aren't visible at all. For example, despite all the brouhaha over Google Streetview in Germany (=big evil US corporation), it turns out that the German government itself regularly does detailed aerial surveys and precise GPS measurements of buildings and sells that information to anybody willing to pay for it (starting at around $200k); that data really is problematic, since it not only shows in great detail private areas protected by fences, but also is being used to charge individuals with code violations. And it's quite clear that European intelligence services spy on their citizens without as much as anybody even batting an eye.
Much of the "Europe is better" perception is a myth, created by the European media and European governments to make Europeans happy, and some of that propaganda spills over into the US.
I remember East Germany. That was a time and place where privacy was an absurd concept. Where has the US gone since the cold war? It doesn't feel much different to me.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
What about companies that have high rates of employee theft?
The proposed law explicitly allows cameras for security reasons or when there is probable cause to assume an employee is commting theft or such like.
The law is against general surveillance.
The idea that you can understand something like privacy laws, which are complex and nuanced, from a half-nonsense google translate is just crap. My German isn't perfect but here are the main points of the article from the German original (http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/0,1518,713153,00.html):
* Video surveillance is banned in areas that have a 'private character' to them such as toilets, change rooms and rest/break rooms. It's still allowed in other areas as long as employees are informed and there's no attempt to hide the cameras
* Recruitment - no data from social networks such as Facebook may be used as part of the recruitment process, social networks specifically designed for recruitment (I reckon they mean ones like Linkedin) are still allowed to be used
* You're still allowed to use any other publicly accessible data off the net, although there may be restrictions related to how old it is or whether the employee/candidate has access to update or remove the data
* Medical examinations - may only be used when there's a good reason
* Screening (they define it as comprehensive comparisons of one employee against another) may only be used under strict conditions. The data must be handled anonymously unless it shows strong evidence of a problem (eg. criminal activity).
* The law establishes conditions under which phone and email communication can be monitored. These conditions vary depending on documentation requirements, the type of business and the individual usage agreements for IT in each company.
Pre-canned Evolution Links for all those Slashdot holy wars.
Sounds like a good law to me but I assume that a complementary suite of protection is required to indemnify the employer against any activities undertaken by an employee under the protection of privacy. For example if an employee sends you a hate mail using a company email account then then you cannot sue the company.
Yes, it's time to get a job in a German warehouse: As warehouse detective!
Oh, and don't forget that it's certainly not forbidden to tag your wares with RFID. Indeed, this already is widely used to prevent theft (the RFIDs are disabled at the cash desks so they don't trigger alarms for bought stuff; I guess there's a trail of this so any mismatch between disabled RFID wares and cash contents can be tracked to the cash desk worker (after all, it doesn't matter for the warehouse whether the cash desk worker takes the ware unpaid, or takes the cash of a customer who paid).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That sounds more retail than warehouse. RFID's fine for protecting your goods from customers - less so when protecting them from your employees. After all, its your employees that do the tagging.
I work for an online store - we've got trucks coming in to dump stuff, trucks coming in to pick up pallets of gear, and forklifts zipping around all over the place. Stopping to RFID each individual article before shelving it in the warehouse would probably cost more in lost staff-time than it saved. A one-time installation of a few IP-based cameras, and a review of the tapes when stock-loss creeps up is far more cost-effective.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Perhaps not suspiciously regarding your employees as thieves builds, oh, I don't know, an actual environment of trust and respect? The culture of corporate sabotage certainly exists on this side of the pond, but only in occasional moments during particularly vicious company mergers or layoffs. It's much more effective here to have one or two auditors trying to spot patterns not consistent with customer-originated shrinkage, and then come in for a closer look. Even if nobody gets caught, the one guy on the take usually backs down.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
My point was that employee theft is worse in places with poorer labour laws and oppressive workplaces, nothing more. Such extreme measures wouldn't be needed, but rather milder ones. It's a self-reinforcing problem, the more I get treated like a potential thief, the less I'm going to care about the company in return. Don't get me wrong, I think all businesses everywhere are sociopaths, but the illusion of corporate loyalty benefits everyone.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
You're making the Libertarian argument; in other words, you're describing your conviction that the government should not be able to legislate what a private company does to the things it owns. That's okay, but it's kind of a meaningless argument, since you're merely implying that everybody should follow your ideology, without giving reasons for why they should do so.
Obviously, not everybody subscribes to your ideology. So rather than arguing that we should all follow your ideology, why not discuss this law based on its merits or problems? Ideology aside, isn't it a good thing that the government has rules in place detailing what levels of privacy an employee can expect when using the employer's computer?
There are studies.
At the same time the German government mandates Vorratsdatenspeicherung (telecommunications data retention) and we would have internet censorship now if it wasn't for the federal constitutional court.
Trouble is, by regulating lots of nitty-gritty details instead of a broad "Constitutional right"-style protection, one makes it even harder for the law to keep up with progress - while exposing the loopholes most clearly to those determined to use them with impunity.
Well, we do have a "constitutional right" to privacy. However, there are allways areas where two rights are in conflict (in this example the right of the employer to check if their employers are actually working vs. the right of the employee to privacy). In that case, you have to clarify which right is more important. This law does basically clarify that. Most of the stuff described in the article would have deemed illigal by most judges even before that law (i.e. having cameras on the loo). But we don't have case law, so to have legal certainity, codification of law is needed.
Today Europeans in general and Germans particularly know what happens if you let governments screw around to much. We've already tried out the prime example of a fascist regime, the one and only, the Mercedes-Benz class of totalitarian states, so to speak. And it ain't pretty, trust me on that one. Curiously enough, I have the entire spectrum of sides in the 'Third Reich' in my family. My US Grandpa was there on D-Day, my German Grandpa is a Type-A Waffen-SS /SD Officer - (Kompanieführer) still alive and kicking at 96, (blacklisted in the US too ... the whole shebang), and my uncle was a Jew on the run from the Gestapo and the SS, hiding away in sewers and all that. We've basically got it all here in one spot, German post-war offspring from US soldiers (f.e. me), old Nazis, art-class comrades that where 'unerwünschte Personen' ('unwelcome persons') in eastern Germany before the reunification, etc. pp. If you're only the slightest bit interested, you get a full-scale rundown of what happens when things in politics and public affairs go hairwire or head down the wrong road. The mechanisims aren't trivial, but there all the same, be they Nazi, Commie, Fundamentalist Islam or whatnot. Very interesting live history lessons to be made here indeed. One of the upsides of living in Germany.
And while a basic trust in law and order is commomplace around western Europe Civil - manly due to the dence population and a historically grown optimization of things, civil disobedience and a basic sence of educated distrust is also quite commonplace around here. I presume the latter is due to a (still) relatively high level of education among the general population.
God help us all when the US comes around to taking it's shot at fascisim.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
In the US, (IMHO very bad) court decisions have made it so that businesses - corporations - are commonly treated as if they were persons under the law. This leads more or less naturally to weighing the rights of the corporations against the rights of a flesh-and-blood person; and when a corporation contributes more to the public trough than the citizen does, the outcome is often a foregone conclusion.
Lately, it's been rattling around in my old head that perhaps, instead of treating corporations like persons, we should treat them like useful, but very dangerous, viruses. Comparable to one that generates some useful end product, but would eat your flesh off if you got any on you. Because other than the end products they make, I'm really hard put to think of much good corporations do unless they're legislated into a corner and forced into it.
In this case, the nagging thing is that if there's corporation on the one hand, and it thinks it has a right to look at your credit history, your online activity, or how you crap in the bathroom, and an actual person on the other, who thinks they have a right to privacy... you know, I'm probably going to side with the person. Perhaps we should be thinking how to best rein in corporations instead of how to rein in employees. Legally.
Might this disadvantage the corporation? Yeah, it might. Just like the constitution disadvantages (well, is supposed to) the government. My response to that is that if the corporation wants to ensure the person's loyalty and fidelity, that they do so by ensuring that the person in question has every reason to feel that serving the corporation is the best choice. Rather than depending on rights-eroding legislation to trap the employee into a regimented behavior pattern they really don't support.
Perhaps they could start by paying a little less to the top levels, pruning the ridiculously incompetent middle management, and compensating the people who do the actual work a little better. Maybe even provide decent healthcare, you know? Radical, I know, but it's late, and I'm riding the caffeine monkey, or vice versa. All I'm sure of right now is that the ringing in my ears isn't the damned liberty bell.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yes, I know this might come as a shocker to many but there are people, companies, managers and even governments (not necessarily the German one though) that do not see a human as a pure cost factor, comparable to a machine on the assembly line or the rent for the office.
A human should be treated as such and surprisingly will perform quite well if done so. What do you expect from someone who is monitored 24/7 (or at least 8+/5), whose work time is recorded by the second? Sure, that might work for really basic jobs, like cleaning the roads or the like. But for anything a little more demanding or even remotely creative (yes, even working in a lousy call centre requires some creativity at times) this will result in frustration and delivery of the minimal required performance instead of the maximum possible.
Stop to treat your employees like animals in a barn and you might notice a surprise: productivity goes up!
So if passed, German employers can't monitor employee emails sent from employers servers during business hours? They can't access employee pages on public websites (Facebook) though anyone else can (like customers)? Seems to me a few employees could destroy a company and the employer would be helpless to stop it. Imagine a disgruntled employee that starts telling off customers via emails, posts falsehoods about company products on site like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and steals office supplies - this law ties the hands of the employer to track such activities.
I hope they called this the "Lousy Employee Protection Act"
Ken
Once again a bill is passed where the author has no idea how technology works.
IE, nearly all workplaces have passive filtering and monitoring. A company does not have to "log into" your facebook profile to see it, because facebook does not use SSL. Everything you do is in the clear and their passive monitoring can see it and record it if need be.
I think it's ironic that in a country where you can be put in jail merely for questioning the number of people who were killed during the second world war (regardless of evidence one way or the other),
There is plenty of evidence that it happened, and that a lot of people where murdered.
Denying that it happened goes against the facts, and is defamatory (sp?) to the victims and their families.
People who deny the holocaust basically call everyone who suffered through it a liar, even though there's plenty of evidence.
Free speech has it's limits. Talk with the lawyers in your country aber hate speech, defamation and such like.
This is just the implementation of Directive 95/46/EC. Over here in Portugal we have that kind of protection the constitution itself.
You are technically correct. However, "slack" is important.
If you are constantly under surveillance by the government, you are living in a police state. This does not make for good living.
It's no different at work. If you are constantly under surveillance, you are in a sweatshop, which does not make for a good working environment. Such working conditions are unacceptable.
If you cannot trust your employees to get their work done, then you either need to train them or fire them. If they get their work done, then it should not matter if they spend a bit of time dealing with personal matters while in the office.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Actually it's not a US vs Europe thing. You've just found an edge case. Few in the US would agree with him either. All of those things are illegal in ever jurisdiction I'm aware of here in the US.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
We need a variation of Godwin's law that covers the use of 'slavery' in discussions about employment. There is a huge difference that is obvious to everybody, who the f* is talking about anything that remotely resembles actual slavery? It lowers the argument to the level of pie-throwing.
In group behavior: 'because they're evil/morons/sheep/crazy' is not 'insightful' it's 'oversimplified'
One thing irks me about human psychology -- we assume that others are like ourselves. That many elements of our native culture are common to other cultures. Wrong! There are obvious differences, and these derive from and generate less obvious differences.
So we have the spectacle of euros, limeys and yanks each telling the others "you're doing it wrong!"
I've worked in Germany. I think they could loosen up a bit. So do they, but for a variety of reasons (inflexible jobmarket) cannot. If workplace privacy helps _them_, why not?
Just because workplace privacy would instantaneously be abused in the US, UK and Oz does not mean the net effect would be negative in Germany.
The US needs the Medical tests part so you can't get fired if your BMI is to high, you smoke off the job, you do other stuff off the job, and even if you are on medical marihuana.
Some one is suing walmart over that and walmart has no right to fire some other what drugs some is taking.
At present, US companies can be held legally responsible for employees being made uncomfortable, even if the things making them uncomfortable were not specifically directed at the employee and even if the company was not aware of it. But that together with this and the company is in a Catch-22, where it's legally responsible for the content of e-mails that it's not allowed to look at.
Well for one, /. has a very "free market is God" audience for some reason. It tends to make it hard to "take a pulse of the nation" on this site. For another, I was specifically referring to the types of monitoring listed above (bathrooms, changing rooms and the like) which are not able to legally monitored in this country (at least not anywhere that I know of, stuff like this tends to be covered by state and local laws, not federal), and you'd probably be pretty hard pressed to find anyone who thinks they should be. Certainly Americans (in general) are less privacy aware than Europeans (in general), but not to the level displayed in the post above.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Let's see, on Slashdot, will the Slashtards want to be able to goof off at work and browse porn, or will they have common sense and understand what work is, and that you have sold your time to your employer and are supposed to be working for them while you're at work.
I'm a life long citizen of the U.S.. I can not agree with, endorse or applaud your opinion more.
I've seen so many of the examples of the rant you answered. "How dare you abuse our poor CEOs, millionaires and billionaires" like the author is their next door neighbor and has a likelihood of being in that position someday.
The cartoon character "Homer Simpson" started off as a satire of the average American. I'm amazed at how many people laugh along, not being outraged of how much art imitates life. Like you wrote, on every objective measure of things most people value ( health care, education, environmental metrics, etc ) the U.S. is never first and is often way down on the list, but "Homer Simpson" honks his horn, flashes his headlights and chants "USA! USA!".
Your answer to the loss of productivity due to goofing off on the web is the same as the answer I've had for years in regards to drug testing. If someone acts inappropriately at work or if someone's productivity is low, fire them for that. Don't violate their freedom and dignity.
I agree. Many people have the attitude that "employee" is just a step above "slave".
I wish I could moderate your post up to a 10.
For years I have not been able to believe how ignorant my fellow Americans are and how often they *energetically* and *obtusely* speak out against their own benefit
You are technically correct.
That's the best kind of correct...
In a modern way ...
http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/23/germany-slapping-rfid-tags-on-its-populace-for-the-sake-of-brisk/
What the Germans learn from losing a war, we in the US and UK forget after winning the war. The thought-police with legal-rights will punish the thought (comical, artistic, political, personal, social...).
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Since the advent of the internet, the amount of dog-fucking on the job has gone through the roof. Let's not kid ourselves, we ALL do it. Any of you who disagrees is not only lying to us but lying to yourselves. I love the internet. I love using it as much as I can. If my employer was paying me to play on it, I'd be a millionaire. The thing that I like about this German law is that it means that Germany will become less and less productive. This will mean that the rest of us who actually work will all end up with more opportunity as Germany's production slides and product quality deteriorates. So, the bottom line is that I whole-heartedly support the German government's decision to let the workforce dog-fuck. The rest of the world wins!
*** Don't be dull.***
In the US public transportation (buses, light rail, etc.) is pretty much dead. Ridership is way, way down.
I see the final nail in the coffin being the Chicago subway motorman that sues to be allowed to operate a subway train while using meth. These days there is probably a 50-50 chance of winning.
If the employee doesn't like the policy, he can either make a convincing case the employer why it would benefit everyone to change it, or try to find another employer with a different policy.
FTFY
(+1, Disagree)
Are you posting from work? :-)
Not safe for work in a political sense:
http://whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
Also, on rethinking economics related to jobs:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
Also, vitamin D deficiency is an oocupational hazard of indoor IT workers. You may want to start taking 5000 IU Vitamin D3 daily and get your blood tested regularly, as recommended here:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
And get your coworkers to get tested for vitamin D deficiency too, before OSHA gets on your case. :-)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Agriculture - Register as Trust
Manufacture - Register as Club
Services - Register as Partnership
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
How do you know that this law will not encourage the use Facebook to research applicants? You don't know the minds of all employers.
The problem is that the employer holds too many cards but that is the nature of his position. If the employer finds something that he doesn't like on your Facebook then there is no law that can stop him from hiring someone else. Where he browses is his private business. The solution is to not tie illicit information to your real name. Keep two Facebook accounts, don't use it, etc.
As for Baby boomers they have common characteristics within Westerns societies and this has been written about extensively. There were plenty of German hippies and revolutionaries during the 60's and this group is now grown up and shares a lot of the beliefs of US boomers.