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

Technological advancements pose serious threats to workers’ privacy. This article focuses on practices that greatly blur the line between workers’ private life and life at work, such as the practices of “bring your own device,” and linking cloud storage to personal and work devices. The first sees workers allowed to use personal devices for work-related activities, potentially for several employers. The second sees workers using online storage for personal and professional reasons, linking this storage to personal and work devices. Such practices can be useful for workers. However, they also present challenges for workers’ privacy, particularly when other legal frameworks are implicated. Employers may have legitimate reasons and a legal basis to request access to, control, and search of workers’ devices on the basis of, inter alia, data protection, freedom of information, and civil procedural rules. These rules may promote other legitimate goals. However, when individuals do not separate their private and professional activities cleanly within or across devices in a way that can be searched, the legal regimes in question can pose threats to privacy. These regimes may require analysis of unseparated material through accessing data and devices. This article examines this trend with a primary focus on United Kingdom and European law. We 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.