A company will not be able to install tele-cameras inside the employers’ changing rooms. This has been confirmed by the Privacy Guarantor, who has rejected the request of a company to activate a video-surveillance system that would have violated the legitimate expectation of privacy and the workers’ dignity.
The engineering company has claimed that it was a necessary measure to put a limit to the “several and repeated warnings of theft in changing rooms”, which had already induced it to reinforce the lockers, providing them with padlocks, and to install a tele-camera at the entrance of the changing rooms.
Upon the request made to the Guarantor, the company had also attached some reports of thefts occurred in the last two years, as well as an agreement reached with the company’s trade unions that according to the company would have allowed the extension of the current video-surveillance system inside the changing rooms.
In banning the realization of the project, the Guarantor has claimed that the installation of the tele-cameras in the workers’ changing rooms was not compliant with the rules on the protection of personal data. The system, in fact, was configured in such a way as to foresee expressly the detailed control of the entire area destined as a changing room, without any limitation as regards the angle of view, in a specific zone, instead, by a particular expectation of privacy and of privacy and dignity protection of the person. The company, further, had not given reasons for the uselessness of the safety measures already adopted (reinforcement of the padlocks, tele-camera at the entrance of the changing rooms) and also the reports, filed to support the project, concerned thefts occurred in other areas of the company and beyond working hours.
The project, in addition, did not respect either the agreement reached with the trade unions, either with regard to the installation sites of the tele-cameras or, for example, with regard to the storage times of the images.
(from the Newsletter of the Privacy Guarantor of 17.09.2014 no. 392)