A New Law Could Have Direct Affect On Fleets Utilizing GPS Tracking Devices.
A proposed law would require employers to inform their employees about the electronic monitoring processes used by the company.
While the proposed law would only pertain to Ontario and is not currently in place, the law could be a signal of personal privacy shifts coming in the future that business owners may want to work ahead of.
The proposed law would mandate that ” … employers with 25 or more workers will be required to have a written electronic monitoring policy in place for all their employees. The policy would need to contain information on whether the employer electronically monitors its workers, and if so, a description of how and in what circumstances the employer does this. In addition, the employer would need to disclose the purpose of collecting information through electronic monitoring.”
As the workplace surveillance and tracking inevitably increases, business owners and fleet managers do need to be proactive in their approach to transparency with employees and creating best practices.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has written about this development and has suggested that the questions, ideas and topics fleet managers and business owners should consider include:
- Determine that less intrusive methods can’t do the job and that there is a documented, specific, ongoing, verifiable concern.
- Engage in employee consultation regarding measures and means
- Develop policies and procedures that outline the roles and responsibilities of people involved in collecting personal information – how will the information be used for or against workers and who decides? What are the safeguards?
- Require larger companies to do privacy impact assessments for new tools to make sure it is designed to minimize impact on privacy and compliant with privacy law
- Provide training for those who work with the data
- Document the way appropriate security for the data is assured
- Conduct compliance reviews and evaluations with the transparency policy and the wider surveillance policies around the use of monitoring tools
- Ensure -access for employees to their own personal information collected by the monitoring tools
- Provide for regular audits/evaluations
If you would like to learn more about how you can utilize GPS tracking to monitor employees or vehicles, click here to request a complementary quote!
