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German Court Rules Bosses Can't Use Keyboard-Tracking Software To Spy On Workers (thelocal.de)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Local: The Federal Labour Court ruled on Thursday that evidence collected by a company through keystroke-tracking software could not be used to fire an employee, explaining that such surveillance violates workers' personal rights. The complainant had been working as a web developer at a media agency in North Rhine-Westphalia since 2011 when the company sent an email out in April 2015 explaining that employees' complete "internet traffic" and use of the company computer systems would be logged and permanently saved. Company policy forbade private use of the computers. The firm then installed keylogger software on company PCs to monitor keyboard strokes and regularly take screenshots. Less than a month later, the complainant was called in to speak with his boss about what the company had discovered through the spying software. Based on their findings, they accused him of working for another company while at work, and of developing a computer game for them. [...] So the programmer took his case to court, arguing that the evidence used against him had been collected illegally. The Federal Labour Court agreed with this argument, stating in the ruling that the keylogger software was an unlawful way to control employees. The judges added that using such software could be legitimate if there was a concrete suspicion beforehand of a criminal offense or serious breach of work duties.
if only we had an Federal Labour Court or union in the usa.
Dam the EU is so nice. Over time cap / better workers rights and healthcare not tied to jobs.
1. Company A used blanket monitoring software on its employees' machines;
2. Employee was caught by above-mentioned software working for another company while at work at company A;
3. Employee argues proof gathered was gathered illegally.
4. Court agrees with employee.
Outcome might have been differently if company A would only have monitored suspected employees instead of all of them.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
But one screen of code looks pretty much like any other, especially to managers.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
How else is Volkswagen supposed to catch those 'rogue engineers' who programmed cheats into the control systems of diesel powered cars?
Gutting and cleaning your catch on top of your TPS reports is a dead giveaway though.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Sounds like the manager had way too much time on their hands.
Sounds like the employee had way too much time on their hands.
Looks like "upper-management" needs to focus on real worries, like getting more business or making the job more fulfilling. Clearly the employee was bored and wasn't one that was going to sit on their hands and do nothing while they still had a brain to use.
It appears this could have been handled very differently by all parties involved.
When office life turns into cops and robbers, no one is winning and it speaks to bigger issues.
In this case the company installed software for the specific purpose of monitoring employees, but special rules also apply in the EU for routinely collected data that can be used to make inferences about peoples' work.
Some of the commercial applications I administrate for my company automatically log whenever a user starts or stops the application. Those logs can be used somewhat to track how people spend their time at work.
For US based employees we routinely publish usage summaries to help manage our software resources.
For EU based employees our legal department has advised be the usage data is confidential and cannot be shared with management without violating EU privacy laws.
I used to be the manager of 84 people. I mostly knew what my people were doing. I even knew some were working on side jobs during their official working hours. They did not even hide this to me. We talked about. But these people were also the best one I got. They were the only one able to deliver, even off hours when it mattered.
If do not create a trustworthy relationship, breaking news, people are very imaginative to hide from you. And like most thing, people gets addict to hiding, and soon you are a manager having not a clue what is going on in your team. Well done, now you are learning everything when it is too late: projects failures...
Did they have a keylogger on the CEOs computer? That could be a can of worms.
Europe abolished slavery long time ago: no contract can override the laws. What you propose is totally illegal. You have a right to a reasonable privacy even at work. You have the right to call your wife on the work phone to say you will be late or to call to cancel a prostate testing, and doing that without your boss or anybody eavesdropping.
Only a terminally ill society allow this kind of shit.
Europe is far from a paradise. But on this account you are right: employment and slavery are very distinct matters in EU.
I remember that there where one game on either C64 or Spectrum where you could press a "the boss is coming" key which would present a fake spreadsheet page :). Don't remember which game it was though.
German Court Rules Bosses Can't Use Keyboard-Tracking
Keyboard tracking?
09:00 Keyboard is on desk ...
09:01 Keyboard is on desk
09:02
Well, you get the idea with that.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I remember that there where one game on either C64 or Spectrum where you could press a "the boss is coming" key which would present a fake spreadsheet page :). Don't remember which game it was though.
I remember the game GATO had a fake spreadsheet when you hit the DELETE key...
Then of course, there was the reverse. Office 97, had a couple easter-egg games. Excel had a flight-simulator and Word had a pinball game...
Just love that GATO have a morse code table in the manual, these days if a game does not have a GPS style map so you don't have to keep track of your bearing yourself gamers freak out.
Asking for a friend.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The Germans are a bit more sensitive to surveillance by power (state or corporations). They have a few people still alive who remember what happens when it all turns to shit.
The law there is very specific. it is functionally equivalent to the US restrictions on government. sure they can monitor, but they need cause first. no blanket drag nets.
That's how Germany does this but how might this go over in some other part of the world? In a place like China or North Korea I can see a manager doing this but since the government owns everything that's just life in a dictatorship. What about free parts of the world where people are free to work and live where they like?
I've heard of places with union rules that prevent such monitoring. That might not stop the practice but it does require being quiet about it. Places where people work on government contracts might have some pretty heavy handed rules on monitoring computer use, but protecting lives when dealing with potential data leaks is different than just finding out if a code monkey is goofing off.
Some of this employee monitoring is getting out of hand and cheap electronics is making this possible. A "first world" problem I guess. Sometimes people just need to be able to stare at the ceiling for a bit to think, or make a few quick phone calls. Allowing employees to bullshit when things get tense, boring, or just because, helps with morale.
I suspect this guy isn't being honest about how long he's spent away from his work while on the job. I still don't care if the company got slapped about for logging every keystroke. Maybe instead of taking screenshots of his computer screen they should have managers that, you know, manage those under their charge.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I worked for cisco a long time ago and have a friend who's been there almost from the very beginning. he moved to europe and stayed with cisco. he told me a story. it goes like this:
in the US, cisco installs spyware on EVERY pc laptop (along with fake certs that allow them a MitM access to their pseudo encrypted network i/o). in the US, cisco does not tell their employees this, exactly; they just say 'they have the right to monitor employees' but they don't say anything more than that and most cisco employees (the younger ones, at least) are kept ignorant. I saw them reading personal email on work systems, etc etc. really stupid!
in europe, cisco is FORCED to tell employees much more detail about their spying and keylogging. it was via this route (lol) that I found how what cisco is really up to. the guys in holland, germany (etc) know they are being monitored (to the extent that its legal) but in the US, employees are kept in the dark.
note, this is not about cisco; its probably EVERY large corp in the US. the point is: the US is too business-friendly and consumer/employee hostile. overseas, its much more balanced. they have more rights over there, in general, and companies don't OWN their fucking asses like they do here.
folks, be careful if you work for a large corp in the US. you have been spied on, data logged and MitM'd. and likely, you had no idea, either, since no one told you (for certain).
It'd be interesting to know whether such a contract would be legal under EU law, which (unlike US law) explicitly recognizes a fundamental right to individual privacy.
If you look into privacy cases, you'll see that expectation of privacy is an important factor. If you are going to monitor your employees' keystrokes, the only way it could possibly be reasonable is if you're up front about it. That way they know that the pissed-off email they draft but never send (a bad idea in any case) will still be read by the boss.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Dam the EU is so nice. Over time cap / better workers rights and healthcare not tied to jobs.
Somewhat startlingly, these are among the very reasons that some wanted UK to leave EU. They call it "taking back control", but things like this are what has irked a lot of the anti-Europeans in the Conservative party.
I was a railway dispatcher before retirement and all my keystrokes were logged by law, (ESTW) because otherwise nobody would have known which actions were triggered when by whom, in case of an accident. Also all my communications, phone, radio etc were recorded as well.
For air traffic controllers it's the same thing.
Correction: They have a LOT of people still alive who remember what happens when it all turns to shit. Don't forget about DDR(east Germany).
The man went to court for being fired based on the tracking software, and won, but he didn't dismiss working on a game for another company during working there.. That's his biggest mistake... Now the company can claim ownership over the code he wrote for the game, as they can claim the code was written while working for the company (doesn't even really matter if it was in his free time (unless his job entailed something completely different like being a busdriver for the company).
As an employee you should make sure it's laid down in you contract what happens to stuff you create in your own free time (so a software developer developing software, or a hardware engineer creating hardware), otherwise if you have a crap boss your project might belong to the company (as it's perfectly feasible you were thinking and even developing it on company time).
But in this case the company just fired him because of it, he should have left it with that, as if I was the boss after being taken to court over his dismissal, I would be going after him for what he was developing during being in the service of my company as I would have every right to it as he even admitted to developing it during working hours in my company.
Designate ALL internal documents as "TRADE SECRETS" and the Contract/NDA/NoCompete is then not only legitimate, but required by law!
You might want to check with a lawyer on this one. If it ever comes to a courtroom, the judge is not going to look kindly on a company that claims trade secret protection for things that clearly are not trade secrets.