Labor and Privacy Implications of Public Surveillance

-- By TheodoraOh - 05 Mar 2024

Introduction: employees surveilled from all angles.

Private or internal surveillance of employees has become a concern as the workplace becomes increasingly digitized and depersonalized. Amazon employees, for example, are electronically surveilled in myriad ways, recording factors like productivity which may impact personnel decisions. Business Insider. Internal surveillance may even monitor relations between employees and union organizers, implicating labor concerns. Washington Post. Third-party, public, or other external forms of worker surveillance should receive equal scrutiny. While there is little oversight of on-site surveillance, it is even more difficult to measure and regulate employees’ exposure to recording by third-parties. We will explore one category of workers who are increasingly subject to third-party surveillance: delivery drivers. Internal surveillance of delivery drivers has already been, and continues to be, scrutinized and litigated. See NLRB memo; Chartwell summary of NLRB decision regarding inward-facing cameras in delivery trucks. But often, delivery drivers may also be recorded by Amazon’s Ring Cameras, which are a home security doorbell camera that homeowners can install and set to record anyone who approaches their door (or even their driveway) without consent or the ability to opt-out. Ring.

Delivery Drivers are subject to being recorded by doorbell cameras without their consent.

As millions of doorbell cameras like Amazon’s Ring are being sold and installed every year, concerns over the outward-facing nature of these devices has risen. Business Wire. Technology review website Wired.com has slowly evolved over the years since Ring’s release from generally positive reviews of the doorbell camera to a more critical and privacy-focused viewpoint. See Wired’s 2015 review, notably praising the camera’s ability to record UPS and FedEx? deliveries; Wired’s 2019 piece that appears conflicted about the “Ringification of suburban life;” Wired’s 2023 article against Ring cameras on the basis that “homeowners shouldn’t be allowed to act as vigilantes;” and Wired’s 2024 reporting on warrantless video requests for Ring data. As delivery drivers and the general public become more aware of the constant, inescapable surveillance of the Ring camera (and, by extension, Amazon—or even the police), some homeowners remain staunchly pro-Ring. See Amazon's letter to Senator Ed Markey regarding police access to Ring data; but see recent changes to Ring’s policy in the New York Times. The FTC has noted concerns about Ring’s failure to protect private information, with a focus on exposed videos within consumers’ homes—this implicates larger concerns about the unwarranted, undisclosed public surveillance from those same cameras. FTC.

The American viewpoint: rooted in property rights.

Perhaps due to the historical bias towards individualism and property rights in American society, people may be quicker to protect their supposed right to record what they’re seeing (or what their front door is seeing) than to protect a contrasting right to remain anonymous. This distinction is reflected in differences between American and European conceptions of privacy. For example, the few data privacy protections that exist in America focus on either the sale of personal data (bringing to mind one of the few privacy torts we have—appropriation of a person’s likeness—which hinges on the commercial use of such information as a property right) or the right to delete such information (for example, as codified in the CCPA). 2d Restatement on Torts. An anecdotal point of data that speaks to some Ring owners’ conception of their right to record any stranger who passes their driveway: one user claims that some delivery drivers are using technology to “jam” the Ring signal so they won’t be recorded. According to this user, they “DO have a right to know what’s going on on [their] property, and delivery drivers have no reasonable legal expectation of privacy once they enter someone’s property.” See a 2022 post on an internet forum (r/Reddit) relating to Ring cameras.

The European viewpoint: a different approach.

On the other hand, the European Union recognizes the right to be forgotten, which differs importantly from the right to deletion. GDPR. While the two phrases are often used interchangeably, the right to deletion refers to private information whereas the right to be forgotten refers to public information, which you yourself might have publicized in the first place. Further, the phrase “right to be forgotten” evokes a more moralistic and almost nostalgic conception of privacy and anonymity. By characterizing this right as nostalgic, I mean to suggest that this protection in some ways aims to take us out of the post-internet era (“the internet is forever”) and back to a time where you could say something dumb or take a bad picture or generally make a mistake that eventually everyone would forget. While there are concerns that this policy might encourage censorship or the rewriting of history (perhaps allowing those wishing to clean up their image to delete blackface pictures, or politicians to remove valid criticism), a policy of forgetting could also help release us from the chains of an immortal digital footprint. See Tessa Mayes’ op-ed in The Guardian; the case of Mario Costeja González in the European Court of Justice at The Guardian; and an analysis from the New York Times which recounts a recent ECJ ruling which gives countries the right to demand Facebook delete certain posts or comments.

Conclusion: negative outlook for delivery drivers.

Ultimately, the right to be forgotten may be a far-away dream for Americans, but in the meantime, the right to protect your own personal data and, to an extent, your public appearances and actions, remains a battleground for labor and privacy activists. An important early step in the fight for privacy protections for employees involves reconceptualizing privacy rights as equally important to property or other rights, and as public perception changes, we can perhaps look forward to even more robust privacy protections. At this moment, though, it’s not entirely clear what someone like me can do except not buy a Ring camera, or downvote “delivery driver caught dancing on Ring camera” videos. Vice.