Limitless Worker Surveillance
Limitless Worker Surveillance
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DOI：
10.15779/z38br8mf94
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发表时间：
2017-09-01
影响因子：
2.4
通讯作者：
Schultz, Jason
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Ajunwa, Ifeoma;Crawford, Kate;Schultz, Jason
从 1850 年代的平克顿私家侦探，到 1990 年代的闭路摄像头和电子邮件监控，到量化工人生产力的新应用程序，再到作为工作场所健康计划一部分的健康数据收集，美国雇主越来越多地寻求跟踪员工的活动。从泰勒主义和福特主义开始，美国工人已经习惯了更高水平的监控，而有组织的工会和劳动法的法律平衡只能减轻这种监控。因此，除了经济和技术限制外，法律一直被认为是对这些监视活动的限制。最近，大数据分析、通信捕获、移动设备设计、DNA 测试和生物识别等多个领域的技术进步极大地扩展了工人在工作期间和工作之外的监控能力。尽管多种形式的监视成本已大幅下降，但新技术使对工人的监视变得更加方便和容易，而工会在为工人辩护方面的力量也大大减弱。美国工人现在必须与一个全视的Argus Panoptes抗衡，该技术采用的技术允许在工人表面同意的情况下从互联网上搜寻员工数据，并允许雇主收集生产力数据和健康数据。这就提出了这样的问题：法律是否仍然是划定工人监视界限的有意义的途径。在本文中，我们从规范的角度出发，即隐私权不是可以用来交换就业机会的经济物品。然后，考虑到最近的技术创新，我们检查了该法律作为对侵入性工人监视的检查的有效性。我们特别关注工人追踪的两个流行趋势——生产力应用程序和工人健康计划——认为当前的法律约束不够充分，可能会让美国工人受到雇主 24/7 全天候监控的摆布。我们考虑了三种可能的方法来弥补法律的这一缺陷：（1）全面的综合联邦信息隐私法，类似于欧盟采取的方法，它将在不同程度上保护所有个人隐私，无论一个人是否在工作或其他地方，并且不考虑所涉及数据的敏感性； (2) 范围更窄、针对特定部门的《员工隐私保护法》(EPPA)，其重点是禁止超出工作相关地点或活动范围的特定工作场所监视做法； (3) 范围更窄、针对特定敏感度的《员工健康信息隐私法案》(EHIPA)，它将保护最敏感类型的员工数据，特别是那些可能不属于《健康保险流通与责任法案》(HIPAA) 管辖范围的数据，例如健康状况以及与健康和个人身份相关的其他数据。
From the Pinkerton private detectives of the 1850s, to the closed-circuit cameras and email monitoring of the 1990s, to new apps that quantify the productivity of workers, and to the collection of health data as part of workplace wellness programs, American employers have increasingly sought to track the activities of their employees. Starting with Taylorism and Fordism, American workers have become accustomed to heightened levels of monitoring that have only been mitigated by the legal counterweight of organized unions and labor laws. Thus, along with economic and technological limits, the law has always been presumed as a constraint on these surveillance activities. Recently, technological advancements in several fields-big data analytics, communications capture, mobile device design, DNA testing, and biometrics-have dramatically expanded capacities for worker surveillance both on and off the job. While the cost of many forms of surveillance has dropped significantly, new technologies make the surveillance of workers even more convenient and accessible, and labor unions have become much less powerful in advocating for workers. The American worker must now contend with an all-seeing Argus Panoptes built from technology that allows for the trawling of employee data from the Internet and the employer collection of productivity data and health data, with the ostensible consent of the worker. This raises the question of whether the law still remains a meaningful avenue to delineate boundaries for worker surveillance.In this Article, we start from the normative viewpoint that the right to privacy is not an economic good that may be exchanged for the opportunity for employment. We then examine the effectiveness of the law as a check on intrusive worker surveillance, given recent technological innovations. In particular, we focus on two popular trends in worker tracking-productivity apps and worker wellness programs-to argue that current legal constraints are insufficient and may leave American workers at the mercy of 24/7 employer monitoring. We consider three possible approaches to remedying this deficiency of the law: (1) a comprehensive omnibus federal information privacy law, similar to approaches taken in the European Union, which would protect all individual privacy to various degrees regardless of whether or not one is at work or elsewhere and without regard to the sensitivity of the data at issue; (2) a narrower, sector-specific Employee Privacy Protection Act (EPPA), which would focus on prohibiting specific workplace surveillance practices that extend outside of work-related locations or activities; and (3) an even narrower sector and sensitivity-specific Employee Health Information Privacy Act (EHIPA), which would protect the most sensitive type of employee data, especially those that could arguably fall outside of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act's (HIPAA) jurisdiction, such as wellness and other data related to health and one's personhood.