Responding to Covid-19: Tracking social distancing at work

This is the fifth article in a series articles on issues arising from, and responses to, Covid-19 in the UK and beyond. I look at some of the opportunities and issues that arise with tracking social distancing at work to reduce the risk of infection from Covid-19.

In responding to Covid-19, we’ve seen the rapid development and deployment of new tech to help reduce the risk of infection and track and trace those who may have been exposed. And there’s been a significant shift in people’s views on using tech with a greater willingness to provide mobile phone data to track those who have either been diagnosed with Covid-19 or people they’ve been in contact with.

On the whole, uptake is voluntary. However, a set of different issues arise when it becomes embedded within the workplace. And demand for technologies that can track social distancing at work is growing quickly.

The session was chaired by Zoe Tabary, Property Rights Editor, Thomson Reuters Foundation. It was part of a series delivered by the the Benchmark Initiative who explore ethical issues raised by the proliferation of location data, and ways that public interests can be protected while supporting innovation.

Panelists included:

• Andrew Pakes, Director of Communications & Research, Prospect
• Gina Neff, Associate Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Department of Sociology, University of Oxford. Author Venture Labor (2012), co-author Self-Tracking (2016)
• Dr Ana Basiri, Lecturer in Spatial Data Science and Visualisation, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London
• Leo Scott Smith, Founder and CEO, Tended

Returning to work: the context

As the UK begins easing lockdown measures, we’re seeing more and more people return to work, particularly in those areas where it isn’t possible to work from home. Recent figures from the Office for National Statistics suggest that about 20% of employees are concerned about their return to work due to concerns about Covid-19.

Employers are looking to how they can reduce the risk of infection for their staff. While much of the focus is on workplace social distancing, many are looking to tech solutions to track employees movements.

This leads to a number of important questions:

• What technologies and devices are being considered or already in use and what are the benefits and risks?
• What are the rights and responsibilities of employers and employees around location tracking at work?
• Given concerns that tracking employees may be used in different ways such and monitoring productively, how do we build trust?

Underpinning these questions is the fact that there is a different relationship, a contractual relationship, between employers and employees.

Technology and tracking social distancing at work

The use of sensor technologies to track employees is nothing new. Much of the focus is on health and safety, for instance for miners or on some construction sites. The aim is to prevent accidents. For jobs in the field, sensors may be attached to vehicles to enable the quick identification of location in case of an emergency. And sensor technologies are increasingly becoming embedded within the built environment including in offices and pubic spaces.

There is nothing new about much of this tech. And it’s already embedded for many workers in highly surveilled environments – factories, warehouses and so on. And there are concerns about ‘mission creep’, that monitoring extends beyond work life in home life.

Most location tracking devices, Bluetooth, GPS, are poor at measuring small distances, unable to distinguish for instance between 1 metre and 5 metres. They could potentially indicate for example that you’ve been in ‘close’ contact with someone who tests positive for the virus, even if it means through walls. In returning to work in this Covid-19 era, it may be the case that we need something quite different – not location tracking per se but the development of a person-to-person system.

The company, Tended, have produced a wearable device, and a proximity tag, that monitors the distance between devices. Think of it as a device that vibrates if you come closer than two metres to a work colleague also with the device. It can monitor distances between devices within centimetres.

The importance of building trust

Technology is always political. While on the one hand these types of technologies play an essential role in health and safety, there is also the potential for poor outcomes.

White collar workers are not used to such a high level of surveillance, tracking where you are and who you’re with, how many keystrokes you perform per hour and so on. But things are changing as many begin to return to the workplace. And it is also changing for many workers in vulnerable employment where they may have few protections.

Key questions remain

• How much should an employer know about the specific location of an employee?
• What’s the type, the purpose, and the ends, of the location information being collected? How long will it be stored for?
• Are we laying the framework for workplace data to be used for nefarious purposes?
• What are the trade-offs between privacy and safety? And this trade-off goes beyond the issue of personal privacy. Covid-19 affects not just individuals but also families and communities.

This goes far beyond tech. In brings into question rights and responsibilities, of employers, and of employees. And consideration of legislative and regulatory requirements is important here. This includes Article 88 of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on processing data in the context of employment. There are also requirements for Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIA), including consultations with data subjects and their representatives.

What is clear is that appropriate data governance is essential, ensuring independent oversight, and clarity on what data is being collected, for what purposes, and for how long it will be stored. In the case for Covid-19, there would be no meaningful reason to keep data for an extended period of time.

Conclusion

In managing the current crisis, and as we move to the recovery stage, tech has an important role to play. But it needs to be trusted and trustworthy. And a balance must be struck between privacy and the collection and application of data for the public good. This is not an easy balance. And it gets even more complex within the context of employment. This is only the start of the conversation about tracking social distancing at work.