I'm heading to Washington, D.C., next week to attend the IAPP Global Privacy Summit 2024. If you're joining me at the event, let's make sure we carve out some time to say hi.

One of the best things about how huge this conference has become is that there are a ton of privacy topics to learn about. An issue that's on my mind this week is employee privacy, because it was the subject matter of my class at the law school where I teach.

GPS 2024 has a number of employee privacy sessions, including one exploring the use of artificial intelligence as an employee monitoring tool.

There's been some legislative movement in Ontario on that front lately. First, the province passed a law that required employers to be transparent about what monitoring they were using. More recently, employers are now required to be transparent about the use of AI in the employment setting.

You might recall the Office of the Privacy Commissioner released updated guidance on workplace monitoring last year. It, too, considers technological advancements made — particularly since the pandemic — on what's appropriate when it comes to employee surveillance. You can find that guidance here if you are interested.

In my class this week, we spoke about the inherent tension between employers and their motive to maximize productivity and employees who don't want to check every semblance of privacy when they walk through the proverbial work door.

It's been a tension point for decades, but was actually first looked at through the lens of human rights legislation. In the 1960s and 1970s, when employers first started implementing drug and alcohol testing, employees had to make claims that this violated their rights because it took advantage of a "disability."

I've always argued this is more of a privacy issue and in the early 2000s we started to see our regulators, judges and arbitrators acknowledge as much.

While not a drug or alcohol testing case, the number one case for employee privacy cases, in my mind, will always be the Eastmond case. That's the one about a railway inserting video cameras in the workplace and some employees objecting.

It was a Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act case and the first one to make it to the Federal Court. One of the reasons it is so important is because it was the first to establish the four-part test on when collecting employee personal information will be deemed reasonable.

If you are an employer, do you regularly use that four-part test to make sure that your employee monitoring tools are on-side privacy rules? If you're in D.C. next week, come talk to me about it.