Employer Vehicle Tracking
Employees are entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy in the workplace as has been established by Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights and confirmed by recent case law in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The use of in-vehicle tracking by an employer (‘the controller’) carries a high risk of interfering with the privacy and data protection rights of the employee.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Data Protection Act 2018 (‘the Act’) regulate how personal data may be processed. In the context of in-vehicle tracking, it’s important to remember that location data qualifies as personal data under the GDPR any time it relates to an identifiable individual.
It is therefore important to note that an employer using vehicle tracking is not just collecting data about the vehicle but also the personal data of individual employee using that vehicle, such as location data or potentially even behavioural data about the employee. In order for in-vehicle tracking to be lawful under GDPR, strict requirements must be met by the employer.
Vehicle tracking should not be used for the general monitoring of staff. The legitimate aim of using such technology may be to track or monitor the location of the vehicles used in an employment context, but it is important to note that employers should not regard vehicle tracking as a method to track or monitor the behaviour or the whereabouts of drivers or other staff.