Tracking Employees 24-7 Legal In Most States

No federal privacy law prevents businesses from tracking employees with a GPS or phone-tracking system. The practice is illegal without the owner’s consent in Texas, Virginia, Minnesota, and Tennessee, and the penal code makes tracking difficult in California. Elsewhere the only option is to assert a right to privacy, and hope a judge agrees. A survey reveals that about one-third of employees say their employers track them with GPS, and 15 percent say they are tracked 24 hours a day. In 2015, a woman sued her former employer, claiming she’d been fired for disabling a GPS app on her company-issued phone after she figured out that her location was being tracked around the clock. Her boss told her that the tracking app could even tell him how fast she was driving at any point in time. The case was settled out of court.