German Court Rules Bosses Can't Use Keyboard-Tracking Software To Spy On Workers (thelocal.de) 72
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 us (Score:2)
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.
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Europe is far from a paradise. But on this account you are right: employment and slavery are very distinct matters in EU.
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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.
TL;DR version (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Outcome might have been *different.
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Your opinion is irrelevant. This is about law. Internal regulations are never above law. In Europe, you have a right to privacy even during working hours. In this context, employers are not allowed to forbid personal commodity hardware (personal computer, personal phone, ... Not talking about servers, generic mailbox, functional mailbox or anything not specifically assigned to you ) to be reasonably used for private matter. And consequently, they are not allowed to eavesdrop all your communications.
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On the other hand, you are also typically expected as part of an employment contract to do your job and not to collect a salary from your employer and use their resources but actually be working for someone else. Obviously there are serious privacy concerns with the kind of mass surveillance used here, but let's not pretend the employee was somehow making reasonable personal use of the equipment either.
Also, you're generalizing as if the law is the same on this issue across all of Europe. It's not.
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The claim was not about whether or not the worker was doing their assigned work but what they were also doing. So you do not punch you workers in the mouth when they chat with other non-productively if they are completing their work assignment. So in this instance they could have been firing their most productive worker, one who can finish his work load far faster than the other workers and thus had lots of spare time, which they then filled. So companies go nuts on idle time, must get profit out of worker
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...their most productive worker, one who can finish his work load far faster than the other workers and thus had lots of spare time...
At your job, finishing early means you get "lots of spare time"? At my job, it would mean an increased work-load. If that wasn't available, it might mean reduced hours. I take breaks throughout the day and do things like check the news or post to slashdot (posting to slashdot is probably pushing things). But my boss would be unhappy if I had "lots of spare time," even if I showed good results.
Not all jobs are the same.
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Dude all bosses are the same, regardless of the job. You are not working for them, you are sucking up their profits. You do not earn money for the, you are a parasite sucking away their money. Generally speaking, you want to soundly manage your working life, work for yourself, don't work for someone else. I can only think all that craps enters their head because of guilt, stealing the bulk of your labour, as well as the labour of your coworkers to feed the bosses greed. You can most definitely get fired for
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Bullshit. If there was any fairness in industrial regulation it would be illegal for the business to demand such a thing. You certainly don't see that kind of nonsense in industries where there is low unemployment or workers have any kind of power. Workers are humans, not automations. It's simply not possible to avoid all personal use when you have been assigned a general purpose machine and you are forced to use all day. It's abusive.
And aside from the moral dimension, it is simply stupid. The only outcome
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It's simply not possible to avoid all personal use when you have been assigned a general purpose machine and you are forced to use all day.
Of course it is. How do you think the many millions of people whose jobs do not involve sitting at a desk and using a computer at all manage, or those who do work on a PC but with limited access because it's locked down for security reasons? This isn't nearly as clear-cut an ethical issue as you're making out.
The only outcome that ever arises from restricting what your employees can do and monitoring them round the clock is *reduced* productivity
Reduced productivity compared to them taking your money, using your gear, but doing work for someone else entirely?
The employer might have gone about this the wrong way, and apparently they paid for th
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With the other paragraph you're using a red herring. The main problem here is how that corporation obtained their evidence. The employee can still be guilty of what they did, it's just that the evidence the company collected can't be
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Even with Germany's rather strict employee protection laws a corporation can almost always find a valid reason to fire their employees if they don't do it without prior notice. I mean 'have to let some people go' because of a tight financial situation always seems to work, no matter how the actual situation is. So the real issue here is that they were pretty honest with their employee and stated the exact reasons for doing
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Outcome might have been differently if company A would only have monitored suspected employees instead of all of them.
Not in Germany no. Frankly this won't be the end of it. Expect to hear about huge fines dished out to the company for this. The Germans have workplace privacy dialled up to 11. It is hard enough to capture working metrics on equipment that involves a person operating it if it is possible to link it to a person. e.g. "Alarm at 10:31am, Operator acknowledged alarm at 10:32am" if you have a record of who the operator of the equipment was you damn well better not be capturing the alarm information.
The guys runn
Re:TL;DR version (Score:5, Insightful)
That is not entirely true.
Keeping human dignity intact at the workplace is great in Germany, but that doesn't mean that there are not ways to do it. In larger companies, where you have a workers council, getting their agreement is one way to do it. In all companies, having a suspicion and acting on it instead of doing some kind of Big Brother mass surveilance will most likely not get thrown out in court.
What we in Germany don't like is treating workers as hamsters in a lab and recording every little thing they do just because you can.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Please. Name one country on this earth that doesn't have its own history of genocide, warfare, witchhunts or other barbarism.
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where you have a workers council, getting their agreement
Ahhh I see what you did there. No man I'm not playing your silly game. I'd rather dedicate my time to something with a higher success rate, like finding the last surviving unicorn.
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Argued like a real pro from a sample size of what, may I ask? One?
There are some dick-headed workers councils that don't see beyond their class-warfare politics. There are some worthless councils that say "yes, master" to everything the company wants. There are some fantastic councils who manage the balance between protecting employee rights and being pragmatic with the needs of the company. Most councils fall somewhere inbetween these extremes.
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Argued like a real pro from a sample size of what, may I ask? One?
Not argued, just being slightly facetious. You summarised it quite well, there's workers councils across the spectrum. I just happen to deal with the class warfare political side in our German plants, but it's likely due to the class of people (protection of the working class) and the history (chequered ownership with joint ventures from foreign companies).
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These guys are typically problematic.
My former HR boss is consulting in this field. I work with him sometimes. If you need professional support, I can set you up (my schedule is full, but I think he can fit a couple days in).
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What the rule really needs to be is no spying on workers unless there's something to find. Of course if you knew there's something to find, there'd be no reason to spy on workers.
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Who cares if the evidence was collected illegally, this is not the US, so facts aren't arbitrarily ignored or thrown. and even if it was the US, a company isn't the police.
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Only in punishing the person illegally collecting the evidence. It is not the US, evidence is evidence, it is not ignored unless it is untrustworthy or false.
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But one screen of code looks pretty much like any other, especially to managers.
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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
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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 [apple2online.com] 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 [youtube.com] and Word had a pinball [youtube.com] game...
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Rogue Engineers (Score:1, Funny)
How else is Volkswagen supposed to catch those 'rogue engineers' who programmed cheats into the control systems of diesel powered cars?
Who here had too much time on their hands? (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Re:Make all workers sign a Contract... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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).
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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
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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.
Special EU rules for other data as well. (Score:1, Interesting)
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 soft
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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.
No, I doubt that's what they said.
What your legal department probably told you instead was to anonymize the data and create reports using aggregates where possible. And where it wasn't possible, because the identity of the user(s) could be inferred, then yes, do not share that data with management.
CEO keylogger (Score:2)
Did they have a keylogger on the CEOs computer? That could be a can of worms.
Keyboard tracking (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Can the West Coast join the EU? (Score:1)
Asking for a friend.
How would this play out anywhere else? (Score:2)
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 co
my cisco story (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Depends (Score:3)
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.
Funny.. (Score:2)
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 m
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"We're ignoring your proof" would be the answer they got if they tried that. ...Exactly like what happened here.
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That's a completely different case. It doesn't even really matter if the code was written during his free time. As I said, you have to make damn sure your contract has these things covered, but most contracts don't as developers don't even think about this possibility until it happens to them.
He couldn't be fired because of the method they used to find out he did work for another company during office hours, but they certainly can use it to proof he did work on other companies software during his time at th