Respecting Employees' Privacy

An employer's requirements for information should be balanced with an employee's right to privacy. For almost all personal information — including pay and benefit records, formal and informal employee files, video and / or audio recordings, and records of web-browsing, electronic mail, and keystrokes — the following basic rules should be used to help establish and maintain that balance:

• The employer should say what personal information it collects, why it collects it, and what it does with it.
• Collection, use, or disclosure of personal information should be done only with an employee's knowledge and consent.
• The employer should only collect personal information that's necessary for its stated purpose, and collect it by fair and lawful means.
• The employer should normally use or disclose personal information only for the purposes that it collected it for, and keep it only as long as it's needed for those purposes, unless it has the employee's consent to do something else with it, or is legally required to use or disclose it for other purposes.
• An employees personal information needs to be accurate, complete, and up-to-date.

Employees should be able to access their personal information, and be able to challenge the accuracy and completeness of it.