The Protection of Workers' Personal Data and the Surveillance by RFID in Portugal

Abstract

The way the work is made has been suffering in the last
years countless changes related with the enormous increase and
development of the use of new information and communication
technologies in the work relationship. The theme of privacy and
surveillance of the employer have been turning in a matter of
considerable interest and surrounded of great controversy in the
last years all around the world and Portugal is no exception.
The technological innovation allows, through several
instruments as the use of radio-frequency identification, the
continuous surveillance and monitoring of the workers and new
questions arise in the horizon. These new forms of control
constitute powerful means of surveillance and of memorization,
but also of analysis and of interference in the people’ privacy,
and one of the major challenges put today is the regulation of this
new forms of control in the workplace because the advancement
of modern technology has made it possible to collect and store
information on a seemingly limitless scale, while also facilitating
access to it. And the question that arises before the use of this
technology is to know what limits should be established. And the
answer is related, it seems, with the principles of data protection,
mainly, in Portugal, article 17 of Portuguese Labour Code
related to protection of personal data and also the Portuguese
Data Protection Act, Law number 67/98,from 26th October, and,
most of all, the legitimate principle, the proportionality principle
and the transparency principle.
The RFID has increase exponentially in the last years,
with countless applications in different sections and with very
different purposes, allowing to follow and control not only
objects but also people, especially workers, what has been
originating several problems and issues in Portuguese Labour
Law related to the protection