Privacy Law Commons^™

Trading Privacy For Promotion? Fourth Amendment Implications Of Employers Using Wearable Sensors To Assess Worker Performance, George M. Dery Iii

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

This Article considers the Fourth Amendment implications of a study on a passive monitoring system where employees shared data from wearables, phone applications, and position beacons that provided private information such as weekend phone use, sleep patterns in the bedroom, and emotional states. The study’s authors hope to use the data collected to create a new system for objectively assessing employee performance that will replace the current system which is plagued by the inherent bias of self-reporting and peer-review and which is labor intensive and inefficient. The researchers were able to successfully link the data collected with the quality of …