Smart glasses are coming to work... Is your policy ready?
Most workplace recording rules were written with phones in mind, but more and more people now wear a camera on their face or wrist. It then becomes much harder to tell when someone’s recording. As smart glasses become increasingly popular (read the news article on it further down), you need to protect your team and your business against invasion of privacy. Here are five items to update now so you're safe and sound:
1. Name new tech in your policies – A rule about phones won’t cover glasses or watches. Add camera-enabled wearables by name to your photography, recording and acceptable technology policies, so nobody can say they didn’t know.
2. Say where they’re off limits - meetings, 1:1s, disciplinary and grievance hearings, changing rooms, toilets, and anywhere confidential information is on show. But be careful with blanket bans: some people use smart glasses as a vision aid. Consider adjustments first, like a version with the camera disabled.
3. Be clear about the consequences – secretly recording colleagues can badly damage trust, and it may be treated as gross misconduct. Say so in your disciplinary policy, and still judge each case on its own facts.
4. Don’t forget data protection - Recording people or documents can count as processing personal data under UK GDPR. Cover this in your policy, and decide now who deals with suspected covert recording, so you’re not working it out on the spot.
5. Link it to the new harassment rules – From 30 October, your duty to prevent sexual harassment gets stricter: you’ll need to take “all reasonable steps”, not just reasonable ones. You can also be held responsible if customers, clients or other third parties harass your staff and you haven’t taken all reasonable steps to stop it. If your team is customer-facing, think about whether limiting recording of staff belongs in those steps.
One last tip: assume anything said in a tricky meeting could be recorded. Keep it calm, factual and consistent, and you’ll have nothing to worry about. If that all sounds like a lot, the team at Charlie Grow is here to help.
