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Worker Fired For Disabling GPS App That Tracked Her 24 Hours a Day
An anonymous reader writes: Myrna Arias claims she was fired for refusing to run an app that would track her location even when she was off the clock. She is now suing Intermex Wire Transfer LLC in a Kern County Superior Court. Her claim reads in part: "After researching the app and speaking with a trainer from Xora, Plaintiff and her co-workers asked whether Intermex would be monitoring their movements while off duty. 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 installed the app on her phone. Plaintiff expressed that she had no problem with the app's GPS function during work hours, but she objected to the monitoring of her location during non-work hours and complained to Stubits that this was an invasion of her privacy. She likened the app to a prisoner's ankle bracelet and informed Stubits that his actions were illegal. Stubits replied that she should tolerate the illegal intrusion...."
That's a great point but it does seem like a company should have the right to enable GPS tracking for company assets. Perhaps a good compromise would be that you could indicate when you were off-work to avoid tracking, but if required the device could be signaled to turn back on tracking.
I personally would probably get one of those signal shielding bags and drop it in there when I wasn't to be on-call. Then you could carry it with you even. Then it also appears just as if it lost power for a while, so it would be hard to get in trouble over it...
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I have been paranoid about this for years.
If it's important to you, get your own cell phone and forward your work line to your personal phone. I do this and leave my work cell at home.
I used to have a phone with the problem described in TFA, along with me allegedly being "on-call" at all hours.
Such a shielding bag (really just a Faraday cage) generally worked just fine.
It is important to note, however, that putting the phone in the Faraday bag emulated loss of signal, instead of loss of power, since the program in the phone reported these conditions differently, and so also were the interpretations of these conditions by management.
Kid-proof tablet..
The plaintiff was working two jobs during this time (she wanted to attain health insurance at the earlier place) and the defendants maliciously called the other employer apparently within a week of when she would have gotten her health insurance benefit and got her fired there.
It's one thing to fire an employee, you can always find some fig leaf pretext to cover your ass. But using private information that you got from the employee and going out of your way to contact another employer and cause harm to the ex-employee? There's no legitimate cause for that. That's demonstrates that it wasn't just a bad employee.
You don't suppose that this app has a remote photo-capture feature, do you? Maybe a few other RAT functions? That might be a motive for requiring a (female) employee to have it with them, powered on 24/7...
Just a thought...
Does it spell out that she was compensated on a 24 hour basis? Didn't think so. F U company, and every other company that requires 24/7 support for 8/5 wages.
$7200/month is pretty good wages, and she knew the 24/7 on call requirement before she took the job. She was, apparently, also working for another company doing the same kind of job. Of all the things to object to, this is about the least objectionable.
The first claims in her case are shaky because she agreed to them all. Use your personal phone for work, check. Have it with you 24/7, check. Install the app so you can be tracked, check. She's pretty much got them by the shorts when it comes to them telling her other employer she was disloyal, though.
Of course, it's hard to understand why any company would let you work for three months for a competitor while they're paying you to work for them.
that would be the ones on zero hours contracts. I'm in the process of building a case which involves some reliance on the RCN decision to prove that zero hours contracts aren't just controversial, they're actually illegal.
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i agree bud but its gotten this way because the people allow it until someone like her makes a fuss and puts a stop to it.
Ray Rice is a public figure and as such a public face of the NFL. He as obligations to the NFL in his public persona which are spelled out in his contract.
So, in certain cases, what you do in your off times IS your employer's business, but only so far as it affects your employer's business. However, in this case, I don't think the employer had a "need to know" or a business reason to track employees in their off duty hours.
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Like it or not, a lot of nasty employment conditions are technically legal or hard to prove. Really the best thing is to publicize what is happening on glassdoor and similar sites. It's not going to immediately stop entry level employees, who have few better choices, from applying. But confirmed bad practices will deny the perpetrator ability to recruit top talent for positions that have the most impact on the company's future.
As of now, Intermex is described as nice working environment on Glassdoor. If I was considering an offer and read about 24/7 GPS tracking in page after page of reviews, I certainly would not join.
And what about when your employer does something to bring you disrepute?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yeah, too bad in the US that concept doesn't exist at all.
I've seen small businesses that practically want their employees to sit in the break room all day, and then clock in anytime a customer walks up to the counter, and then clock out as soon as they leave. Essentially businesses want to shift the risk to the employees, and keep the profits to themselves.
Do we believe arsTechnica or the actual court document?
that should include piss-tests, too.
that is absolutely a violation of your privacy. if you have a problem with an employee's performance then you deal it then. you dont' start off assuming that all potential employees are 'bad guys' until proven otherwise.
pre-employment testing is bullshit. this also need to be prohibited by law. problem is, its the US (!) that is kind of forcing and encouraging companies to do this shit! "to get a government contract, you must ensure all your employees, yadda yadda yadda". the US is what started this; companies would generally rather NOT foot the expensve of hair and piss tests, but they are forced to (one way or another) by the government! not all companies seem to let themselves get put into this situation but quite a lot still are on that bandwagon.
if an employee is able to balance his lifestyle outside of work - and if only a chemical test is how you would ever find out - how is this not a violation of his privacy?
--
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When has America been a free country? Seriously, go read "A People's History of the United States". We've been a heck hole for ages. Hell, the reason we have a Senate is to keep the pleebs from voting themselves land (google it). We've always been a country by the wealthy & for the wealthy. We've always put property rights first and human rights second. I don't know why get so confused when we do stuff like this. We've been doing it since the country was founded...
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What? This was a PRIVATE employment agreement between a PRIVATE employer and a PRIVATE employee. If she doesn't like the employers terms she can find a new job. The GOVERNMENT has zero business intruding in a PRIVATE affair!
This was a demand by a Federally licensed LLC on an individual.
If the owner(s) of the LLC wants to be personally legally liable for the actions of the company, I have no problem agreeing with the sentiments in your comment. But as long as those owner(s) want special legal protection by the government, they can respect a few basic social rights.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
She sold herself only for 8 hours, she gets paid only for 8 hours. They claimed her for 24/7.
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Meh; the type of signal does not matter. Until all of cell phone/GPS/Wifi-geolocation coverage is actually 100%, including inside of every building, down in every valley, and inside of every tunnel, there can be no expectation of continuous signal.
Meanwhile, being on call 24/7, 365.25 (this includes every fucking weekend, and every fucking holiday, and every fucking vacation -- no matter how remote) is a recipe for employees (me) finding ways to avoid it.
Realistically, I usually left the phone out of the Faraday bag: Mine had two compartments, one shielded and one not, and I used it as a continuous-duty cell-phone case. When I decided it was *my* time, I put the phone into the shielded side, and I'd periodically check for messages.
I really didn't care about what my boss thought of where I went, or how fast I got there on my own time (he got a speed alert on his own phone one day. His jovial SMS response: "134MPH. Niiiiice!").
It was more a matter of: If I want to take time off and go down in the holler in Kentucky, get drunk, eat lots of bacon and shoot guns, then I'm NOT going to be working, nor am I going to continuously cater to a cell phone. (And yes, I always let them know in advance when I'd be leaving for such a jaunt.)
A better solution is to have rotating on-call duty, with allowance for being absolutely-goddamn-away-from-work, and turning off tracking when one is absolutely-goddamn-away-from-work. Despite being a 9-5 shop supporting 24/7 systems, we had plenty of qualified techs to make things work, and it was an unreasonable expectation that all of them be absolutely on call at all times.
Especially for hourly employees with no stake in the company.
Meanwhile, leaving my phone on my desk would be such a slap in the face that I wouldn't have a job when I came back from Kentucky, and there would be no way for me to help during the time that I was gone if my counterparts really needed me.
Kid-proof tablet..