Tag: Monitoring
21. October 2020
In the beginning of October, the Hamburg Data Protection Commissioner (“HmbBfDI”) imposed a record-breaking 35,258,707.95 Euro GDPR fine on the German branch of the Swedish clothing-retail giant H&M. It is the highest fine, based on a GDPR violation, a German Data Protection Authority has ever issued.
Since 2014, the management of the H&M service centre in Nuremberg extensively monitored the private lives of their employees in various ways. Following holidays and sick leaves of employees, team leaders would conduct so-called “Welcome Back Talks” in which they recorded employees’ holiday experiences, symptoms of illnesses and medical diagnoses. Some H&M supervisors gathered a broad data base of their employees’ private lives as they recorded details on family issues and religious beliefs from one-on-one talks and even corridor conversations. The recordings had a high level of detail and were updated over time and in some cases were shared with up to 50 other managers throughout the whole company. The H&M supervisors also used this Personal Data to create profiles of their employees and to base future employment decisions and measures on this information. The clandestine data collection only became known as a result of a configuration error in 2019 when the notes were accessible company-wide for a few hours.
After the discovery, the H&M executives presented the HmbBfDI a comprehensive concept on improving Data Protection at their Nuremberg sub-branch. This includes newly appointing a Data Protection coordinator, monthly Data Protection status updates, more strongly communicated whistleblower protection and a consistent process for granting data subject rights. Furthermore, H&M has apologised to their employees and paid the affected people a considerable compensation.
With their secret monitoring system at the service centre in Nuremberg, H&M severely violated the GDPR principles of lawfulness, fairness, and transparency of processing pursuant to Art. 5 no. 1 lit. a) and Art. 6 GDPR because they did not have a legal basis for collecting these Personal Data from their employees. The HmbBfDI commented in his statement on the magnitude of the fine saying that “the size of the fine imposed is appropriate and suitable to deter companies from violating the privacy of their employees”.
8. July 2019
Foreign tourists who want to enter the Chinese province of Xinjiang by land are spied out via an app.
For the first time, employees of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Motherboard Vice and various other media portals in cooperation with IT-experts of the Ruhr University Bochum have succeeded in decrypting a Chinese surveillance software that also targets foreigners.
It has been known for some time that the Chinese authorities use apps to monitor the Uighur residents of Xinjiang province (we reported). What is new is that foreign tourists and businessmen coming from Kyrgyzstan to Xinjiang by land have to hand in their mobile phones at the borders and then get the Android app “Fengcai” (“collecting bees”) installed. They are not explicitly informed about this.
The app gets access to the contacts, the calendar, the SMS, the location or the call lists and transmits them to a computer of the border police. In addition, the app scans the phone for over 70,000 files that are suspicious from Chineses government’s point of view. Many scanned files refer to extremist content related to the Islamic state, but also harmless religious content or files related to Taiwan, Tibet or the Dalai Lama are part of the list. If the app discovers anything, it emits a warning tone and thereby informs the border police.
The app also scans the phones to see which apps were installed by the user and even extract usernames but several antivirus firms already updated their products to identify the app as malware.
Neither the Chinese authorities nor the company that developed the app reacted to a request for comment.
3. May 2019
According to research by Human Rights Watch, China’s state and party leaders have had an app developed with which the security authorities in Xinjiang can monitor their inhabitants on a massive scale.
When police officers log into the app, they can see which “conspicuous” behaviours of individual residents have been recorded. According to the published report, the authorities are using the app for illegal mass surveillance and arbitrary arrest of the Uighur Muslim minority living in Xinjiang Province. Up to one million Uighurs are currently said to be imprisoned in “re-education camps”.
Users of the app are asked to enter a variety of information about citizens and explain the circumstances under which it was collected. This includes information such as name or identity card number, but also information such as religious beliefs, blood group or the absence of smartphones. According to Human Rights Watch, the app should also be connected to other databases and alert users if a citizen consumes too much electricity or a mobile phone does not log on to the network for a long time. Citizens should also make themselves “suspicious” if they have little contact with neighbours or do not often enter buildings through the front door.
Human Rights Watch is convinced that this procedure is also illegal in China and that the collected data must be deleted. It remains to be seen whether the Chinese – or other governments will react to the disclosures.
