uWorker’s Lawsuit Claims Company Fired Her After She Removed App That Tracked Her Location 24/7r

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  (Natalie Procter)

  It’s perfectly acceptable for a company to want to know what its workers are up to on the job, but one woman in California says her employers took it too far when they allegedly required her and others to not only keep their phones on around the clock, but submit to GPS monitoring via an app she says had to install as a condition of her employment.

  The former sales executive for a money transfer service called Intermex claims in a recent lawsuit [PDF] (h/t to Ars Technica) that after she disabled the job management app, she was fired by her boss. She says he acknowledged tracking her and her co-workers on their personal time, even making jokes about how fast she drove.

  The lawsuit says he “admitted that employees would be monitored while off duty and bragged that he knew how fast she was driving at specific moments ever since she installed the app on her phone.”

  She claims that she had no problem with the app’s GPS watching her during work hours but objected to monitoring her location on her own hours and complained that it was an invasion of her privacy, likening “the app to a prisoner’s ankle bracelet and informed [her boss] that his actions were illegal. [Her boss] replied that she should tolerate the illegal intrusion” because they were paying her more than another job she had.

  The lawsuit alleges that not only was she “scolded” and subsequently fired by the company for removing the app, her bosses told another company she’d been working with — one they knew about while she was employed — that she’d been disloyal, and that contract was terminated as well. The worker says she “met all quotas” while working at Intermex.

  “Plaintiff’s whereabouts and conduct while off duty, was private and highly confidential. A reasonable person would have an interest in maintaining the confidentiality of such information,” the lawsuit states. “Plaintiff had a reasonable expectation of privacy in her own conduct and whereabouts while off duty.”

  She’s claiming invasion of privacy, retaliation, unfair business practices, and other allegations in the lawsuit and seeking in excess of $500,000.

  Me, I just text pictures of my cat to my coworkers so they constantly know where I am in my off hours.

  
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by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist