GPS Tracking of State Worker Raises Privacy Issues

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from a Times Union article: "How far can state government go in keeping tabs on its employees? That's the question a mid-level appeals court will consider in the wake of a lawsuit filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union against the state Labor Department, in the case of a fired state worker who was tracked with a GPS device that investigators secretly attached to his personal car. ... State officials tracked Cunningham's whereabouts by secretly attaching a GPS device to his BMW. The electronic tailing went beyond what would normally be termed Cunningham's work hours, since the device was on for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They even tracked him on a multi-day family vacation."

Comments

Glad I work in the private sector.

[Anonymous Coward]

No reputable company would ever try something this egregious .

Re:Glad I work in the private sector.

[rubycodez]

without your knowledge? putting tracker on you personal car? if any executive at my employer did that to me, I'd cram said GPS far into their gastrointestinal egress, without lube. that's if I was in a good mood....

Re:Glad I work in the private sector.

[Hope Thelps]

At my company they just set you up to have an affair

Oh, you poor thing. You couldn't just say "no" for fear of hurting his feelings?

Re:Glad I work in the private sector.

[mrchaotica]

the problem was they were tracking him 24/7, and that's illigal.

That, and attaching a device to his personal car should be considered some kind of tresspassing/vandalism.

Re:Glad I work in the private sector.

[tragedy]

Well, actually, I can think of plenty of ways you could be "set up" to "have an affair" as long as "have an affair" remains in quotes. Quite simply, a supervisor at work could require you to work late on various nights but arrange it in such a way that you have no proof that you really worked late. Then they could bring out someone they've hired to claim to have had an affair with you and tell your spouse that you were lying about working late. Maybe they could give you a company credit card as well, then throw some hotel charges onto it.

People with lots of power over you, like employers, have plenty of power to frame you all sorts of things. For example, if they wanted to fire you for whistleblowing, they could set up an environment where employees are made comfortable by supervisors leaving 5 minutes early every day, but marking their full hours on their timesheet. Then they could gather "evidence" against you, such as by tracking your car with a gps tracking device, and then fire you, or maybe even prosecute you, for fraudulently filling out your timecard. Who would believe you? It's a time-honoured tradition for getting rid of unwanted employees: give them implicit, or even explicit (but undocumented) permission to do something that's technically against policy, then bust them for violating the policy.

Re:Glad I work in the private sector.

[Venner]

>>
These days most employers have some boilerplate they hand out when you take a job that says they will do this if they feel it necessary. Really you should assume they monitoring you while you are on the job, if for no reason than protect themselves from things like that $2 billion loss UBS is stuck with.
>>

The point is that these were government workers. Your constitutional rights trump most of what they would ask you to waive. And courts have said that, say, your fourth amendment right require informed consent to waive, which a blanket waiver cannot satisfy.

New York

[Hatta]

New York's court of appeals has already determined that GPS tracking by law enforcement is illegal without a warrant. Since the powers of cops are a superset of the powers of an individual, this case should be a slam dunk for the plaintiff.

Re:What was the state thinking?!?

[increment1]

As alluded to in the article, they were looking into his timesheets and his assertion that he worked odd hours.

It looks like the state thought he was lying about his hours, and so used the GPS tracker to catch him in a lie concerning hours worked. It seems a touch excessive, but government jobs likely require a high standard of proof in order to fire an employee.

Sounds like what Cisco did to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Ex-Cisco employee here. Anon for a reason. They planted a gps tracker in my laptop and pushed down gps tracking software to my cell phone (personal phone, but attached to their email servers). All reporting back to some database servers in Cisco's corporate datacenters.

Found this, confronted them, and negotiated a significant settlement for not going public with the info. Don't care if they track me down now based on this posting, though, as they just laid off a ton of my great friends who remained. So, hopefully this will gain traction and other Cisco employees will look into this unethical (and illegal?) tracking of employees.

And you don't even want to know what kind of monitoring stuff they snuck into their IP Phones... If the public ever figures that out, Cisco has a great cover story ready: there's so much legacy code from Selsius (the original manufacturer of the phone technology) that it was cleverly hidden and unnoticed through years of QA testing.

Fan-tastic...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

"Kate Nepveu, an assistant solicitor general, said the state realized the GPS tracking was intrusive, but Cunningham's pattern of misconduct and the difficulty of constant in-person surveillance justified the technique."

Yup, we knew that we had no business doing it; but he was a Bad Guy and doing our jobs is Hard. Cry, cry, pity me... Is there any sort of procedural abuse that one couldn't justify with exactly that line? Virtually everything we call "due process" is inconvenient for the prosecution, and I've never heard of somebody going after someone that they wouldn't at least say was guilty of misconduct...

Re:Fan-tastic...

[Asic Eng]

What's truly fucked up here is that they felt that they couldn't fire him simply because of his "pattern of misconduct". They appear to have felt that they needed more proof or something.

I interpret that to mean "there wasn't actually a pattern of misconduct, we went on a fishing expedition hoping to find one".

Re:What was the state thinking?!?

[Amouth]

Maybe a better solution would have been to provide him a state vehicle with a hidden GPS tracker. :P

Or an Obvious one, functional or not. That might have got him back into line if there was wrong doing, or show he wasn't worth keeping, either way it would have been far cheaper than a lawsuit even if they win it.

Overtime!

[peacefinder]

If his employer was tracking him, it must have been for work purposes, right? So since he was on the clock, he should at least be paid his contracted rate for all the time he was tracked.

Re:What was the state thinking?!?

[idontgno]

TFA states that they had not exhausted all non-GPS solutions to tracking him.

Even that formulation misses a critical point: The objective which would have been meaningful to their goal (proving timecard fraud) was not "track him"; the appropriate objective is "verify workplace attendance". The phrase in TFA (yeah, I know, no one reads that... just go with it for a second) "worked odd hours at his job" (emphasis mine) indicates that finding out where he was at any time should not have been the objective... only finding out when he was in the office. (He wasn't working from someplace else, since the presumption is "at his job"... at his place of employment.)

So GPS tracking is solving the wrong problem. A webcam monitoring ingress and egress to his office, or computer system logs... a physical access control like a card entry system would have gone a long ways towards determining the real information they needed.

GPS was the wrong solution because it was answering the wrong question. It's not justified.