Protection Of Employees’ Personal Data In The Public And Private Sector, In The Context Of The New It Techonologies

The basic relations between employers and employees are regulated, traditionally, by the Labour Code and the related legislation. As regards the public sector, specific rules regarding the status of the employee as a public servant create a separate legal regime of the working conditions of this kind of staff, which is also completed by the general labour norms. However, nowadays, new problematic topics arise in the context of an working environment “under surveillance”, where the employer chooses to make use of the latest technologies on the market in order to monitor the performance or the behaviour of their employees, whether in the private or public sector. According to the general principles set in the Romanian Labour Code, the employees’ dignity and protection of personal data are to be respected. Therefore, any employer, either a public institution or a private company, has to comply as well with the obligations arising out of the legislation on data protection, especially whenever electronic devices are installed to survey the people or the equipment ”at work”. In the present paper we shall examine the IT technologies most used at the workplace from the perspective of the legal rights of an employee, on the one hand, and the legal duties of an employer, on the other hand, as established by the European and Romanian legislation on personal data protection, taking also into account a number of guidelines derived from the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice of the European Union.