It’s Personal: Employee Privacy and Data Protection Issues in the Connected Workplace

As workforces become increasingly mobile, and the line between personal time and work time blurs further, employers face the challenge of balancing data security with employee privacy rights. While breaches of customer data have received most of the media scrutiny, employee data breaches also are causing company headaches. But there remain increasing pressures to also gather and utilize employee data through the monitoring of employee communications to measure productivity, maintain corporate image, and to deter or prevent wrongdoing.

This CLE program, presented by Partners Barbara E. Hoey, Alysa Z. Hutnik, and Mark A. Konkel from Kelley Drye’s Labor and Employment and Privacy and Information Security practices, will focus on key questions employers face when balancing obligations to their business and employees such as:

• What are HR best practices in these areas?
• What are the lessons learned from past employee data breaches?
• What are employees’ electronic privacy rights in the workplace?
• How should a business strike the right balance between an employee’s privacy rights and protection of the business?
• Can employees use companies’ email systems for personal reasons?
• Can employers monitor employee email use? Do they have to let employees know if they are doing so?
• Can employers sanction employees for comments made on social media? What constitutes private behavior vs. behavior that can adversely affect a company’s image?
• Can employers monitor data on personal devices that are also used for business reasons?