Bring Your Own Device — Now Hand It Over! Rescuing Workers’ Privacy During Data Searches

Even though technological advancements can be useful for workers who can work remotely, and be at times faster and more efficient, they also pose serious threats to workers’ privacy. In this article, we focus on practices that greatly blur the line between workers’ private life and life at work, such as the practices of ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) and linking cloud storage to personal and work devices. The first of these sees workers allowed to use their personal devices for work-related activities, which can be convenient, familiar, and supportive of flexible working, potentially for several employers. The second of these sees workers using online storage for both personal and professional reasons and linking this storage to personal and work devices, which can again be a simple and efficient way to save and backup information and materials. However, practices such as these also present challenges for workers’ privacy, particularly when other legal procedures are invoked. Employers may have legitimate reasons and a legal basis to request access to, control and monitor workers’ devices on the basis of, inter alia, data protection, freedom of information, or civil procedural rules. Yet individuals do not separate their activities cleanly within or across devices in a way that can be searched for, and the scope of the regimes themselves can be unclear. Assessing this scope often requires analysis of unseparated material which employers have taken to mean they require access to the device. The threat to workers’ privacy is obvious. In this article we examine this trend and propose that workers’ right to private life should be understood as a right to supported separation of work and private contexts and a right to control the process of a search of data and devices.