Essays of Faculty of Law University of Pécs Yearbook of 2012

(...) The main objective of this essay is to map current national Hungarian regulations on privacy in the workplace. We will not deal with every single issue regarding data protection in employment: our research will focus on the regulation of technical surveillance in order to differentiate between legal and illegal monitoring or surveillance of an employee, which is a key issue both in Hungary and in the EU. Besides the relevant Acts we also summarise case law in the respective fields. We search for the recommendations of the Hungarian Data Protection Commissioner as well as for the relevant court decisions. Finally the legal literature is also examined in our research. In the first chapter we are going to summarise the basic concept of privacy issues in Hungary, and then we analyse Hungarian regulations on different surveillance technologies which may be used in the workplace. The regulation, typically, does not distinguish between or among technologies, and so, for the most part, the same rules apply. This means that some subchapters will simply refer to another subchapter - but this is in order to avoid repetition. However, our choice of this technology-based structure is based on the fact that the practical problems usually arise concerning a single technology - and so the case law of the DPC and of the courts also focuses on different technologies. Generally there is a legitimate interest on the employer’s side to monitor the employee’s work. Although the right to monitor is not expressly written in the Labour Code, it is widely accepted by labour law experts: The right to but the excess of labour on the job market is a form of defencelessness which makes that unlikely to be so. On the other hand - and this becomes relevant when monitoring employees - “inverted defencelessness” is also becoming more common: various employers’ data are not safe as a result of the use of modem technologies and employees can cause considerable damage to the employer by disclosing confidential information to unauthorised persons. “The defencelessness of the employers is increasing in the information age with novel and significant factors. Employers are experiencing »the enemy attacking from within«, and the fear of this is justified under the circumstances of the widespread possession of information technology.”