The surveillance techniques your employers may be using

By Devyn Lewis

One day, when leaving from the grocery store where I work, I was subjected to a bag check from one of my superiors. I felt violated and bewildered. Having someone rummage the contents of my purse made me feel that I didn’t have the same rights as when I walked in.

In a free society, the police need a warrant before they can come in to search one’s home. However, in the privately owned corporate work environment, one is guilty until proven innocent by a bag check. The power structure forces me to comply, or risk being reprimanded for my dissidence and insubordination.

I was really pushed to my limits when I was asked to give a biometric fingerprint at a retail job. Biometrics is the digital measure of an individual’s biological characteristics, (such as the ridges on one’s finger, the shape of one’s hand, or the pattern of one’s iris) and converts the information into a numerical code called a mathematical template.

Biometrics is yet another security measure that is being adopted to prevent time theft, which includes things like “buddy punching,” where one co-worker writes in another’s time for hours not actually worked.
Depending on which studies you look at, employee theft accounts for somewhere between 42 and 50 per cent of inventory stock loss and is considered far more of a problem than any given shoplifter. Payroll companies like Ceridian Canada claim that through installing biometrics in the workplace, the employer can eliminate payroll errors, reduce time theft, and save the company money.

All sorts of frightening Orwellian images ran through my head when the company asked for my fingerprint. Does this constitute an issue of privacy? Do corporations have a right to ask for this?
What next, my retina scan, or a blood sample, perhaps? I’m not working as a secret agent here; I’m just a regular wage worker trying to trudge my way through university.

It turns out that a common problem in Canada’s privacy legislation is that of balancing privacy with security. Despite the pieces of provincial and federal privacy legislation in place, like BC’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA), or the Canadian federal Personal Information and Protection of Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), I found the issue of biometrics to be vague.

While the legislation does indicate that biometrics constitute as a person’s private information, the lines become blurred as to what information I am required to give to my employer in order for them to conduct their business without compromising my privacy. Information regarding my marital status or my race should be considered irrelevant in order to acquire a job, and yet I cannot withhold my name or my social insurance number (SIN), though these are considered to be private information as well.

So where does withholding my biometric information fit in?
Over the past decade, there have been a few notable cases in Canada regarding privacy rights and biometrics. Worker’s unions brought
forward grievances to the courts, fearing that technology could be used for purposes other than simple payroll purposes, as the personal biometric information could be stored in a company database.

The first case regarding biometrics was in 2002, regarding the replacement of timesheets with an electronic hand-scanning machine. The General Workers Union (GWU) complained that the technology was “dehumanizing the workplace and making the employees feel like they are not trusted.” They were also concerned about the storage and use of such data.

Another notable case took place in May 2005, where the United Steelworkers Association (USWA) opposed the implementation of a partial finger scan machine in place of a punch card system on similar grounds.
The technology was largely questionable and USWA had doubts about the security of the information, particularly with the potential for sophisticated hackers to reverse the data and replicate the individual’s actual fingerprint. The case was decided through weighing out the interests of the employer’s security and payroll purposes and the employee’s right to privacy.

Subsequently, IKO was ordered to cease and desist implementing biometric time-keeping machines as the arbitrator ruled that privacy had indeed been compromised.

Bag checks, along with watchful security cameras, biometric machines, and even RFID chips, reflect the growing security measures in the work environment that have widely diluted the consensus on what constitutes privacy; corporations in pursuit of business goals have challenged what constitutes a reasonable limit to privacy in the workplace.

“I was disappointed by some of the employer attitudes . . . [where] some apparently see workplace privacy as a privilege granted to employees,” said privacy commissioner of Canada Jennifer Stoddart in a November 2006 speech.

“No one agrees with the notion that workers are entitled to some measure of privacy that cannot be taken away. This is deeply concerning to a privacy advocate.”

Technologies like biometrics have presented new challenges to privacy advocates in Canada. In comparison, the overall consensus among advocates of surveillance tools is that common sense will act as guidance for when not to invade an employee’s privacy.

“The current trend is more monitoring, not less,” Stoddart pointed out. “Common sense does not tell us where to draw the line.”

So, where do we draw the line? Turns out, the finger scan machine wasn’t quite as sinister as I had thought it was; corporations are still bound to follow laws protecting a person’s private information.

As outlined in legislations such as PIPA and PIPEDA, individuals have a right to have access their own personal information, know what information the company stores about them, and most importantly, have control of this information. I got the company to show me exactly how the machine works, as well as how to erase my mathematical template at any time.

Furthermore, I found that the mathematical template with my photo (and the word “dissident” written in bold underneath), wouldn’t be stored in the company’s system, but only in a small machine that hung on the wall.

I have to confess, I was a bit relieved.

How far will we compromise as society in order to secure a job? As students, we are often thrown into low paying jobs with few options: we either take the job and obey their rules, or are left with no job at all.

Working in so many low-paying service industry jobs, I was distraught to find that the vast majority of these workers are completely unaware of their rights in the workplace and are just blindly obeying rules in order to keep a job, no matter how uncomfortable these rules may make them.

As for privacy rights, once we lose them, it isn’t easy to gain them back again. In a democratic society it’s up to us to educate ourselves about our rights and preserve them, or we may one day find that we haven’t any left at all.

As for myself, I think I would like to keep Big Brother out my purse.