In a civil suit, what's "reasonable" is up for debate, and it depends on how much you want to spend on lawyer time to prove it. The lesson is clear, if it's cheap enough, then arming yourself with more information is only beneficial to you. So much that it might make business sense to violate the employees' privacy.
The ability to track people's precise locations due to the proliferation of smartphones and various wireless technologies is pretty new, and probably hasn't been tested in various court cases yet.
I know at one point, it was enough to have paper logs of your drivers. But now, electronic GPS tracking is so cheap and commonplace, that the court might say as a business, it is your responsibility to utilize it to ensure your drivers are not regularly speeding.
The problem with civil cases is there are few well defined standards. And if you're in the sweet spot where your business is doing well enough to be a nice target, but not well enough to have lawyers on staff who can deal with swatting them down, then you've got some decent risk exposure you need to address. And the best way to do that is to have as much information as possible.
I'm sure the only reason this issue of tracking is coming up is only because it's so incredibly cheap to track them, since the employee already has a phone on them, the access points or wireless signals are already there, it costs almost nothing to physically download the app and enable functionality, and it costs almost nothing to store this data. At that point, it's a calculation of do we spend this minimal fee to protect from a host of litigation where we can prove this person was at this place at this time.
I find that many of my friends who are office employees or haven't operated a public facing business are unaware of these types of problems that you don't have to deal with when you don't physically entertain random people of the public, thereby greatly reducing your risk exposure to these kinds of scams.
>Regardless, this scenario doesn't really jive with my assertion that it should be illegal for employers to track their employees.
Yes, if it was illegal, it would eliminate this problem. But my intent was to show that at least some of the impetus might not be to make the employees' life worse.
The ability to track people's precise locations due to the proliferation of smartphones and various wireless technologies is pretty new, and probably hasn't been tested in various court cases yet.
I know at one point, it was enough to have paper logs of your drivers. But now, electronic GPS tracking is so cheap and commonplace, that the court might say as a business, it is your responsibility to utilize it to ensure your drivers are not regularly speeding.
The problem with civil cases is there are few well defined standards. And if you're in the sweet spot where your business is doing well enough to be a nice target, but not well enough to have lawyers on staff who can deal with swatting them down, then you've got some decent risk exposure you need to address. And the best way to do that is to have as much information as possible.
I'm sure the only reason this issue of tracking is coming up is only because it's so incredibly cheap to track them, since the employee already has a phone on them, the access points or wireless signals are already there, it costs almost nothing to physically download the app and enable functionality, and it costs almost nothing to store this data. At that point, it's a calculation of do we spend this minimal fee to protect from a host of litigation where we can prove this person was at this place at this time.
I find that many of my friends who are office employees or haven't operated a public facing business are unaware of these types of problems that you don't have to deal with when you don't physically entertain random people of the public, thereby greatly reducing your risk exposure to these kinds of scams.
>Regardless, this scenario doesn't really jive with my assertion that it should be illegal for employers to track their employees.
Yes, if it was illegal, it would eliminate this problem. But my intent was to show that at least some of the impetus might not be to make the employees' life worse.