Lawyers: Employers Must Balance Privacy, Safety When Deploying Wearables

"In general, we're talking about technologies worn by workers that are designed to reduce accidents and help keep workers safe by monitoring how they're moving, what they're doing, and also alerting them to dangers," said Gail Gottehrer, vice president of global litigation at Del Monte Fresh Produce Company. "They have sensors and smart features to prevent accidents and injuries ... some have GPS location tracking, voice control and emergency alerting capabilities."

But Leeza Garber, a cybersecurity and privacy attorney, said businesses must ensure that the technology is used in the right way by employers and employees, and that they are not opening the door to privacy and data-security violations.

Gottehrer agreed. "There's legitimate business interruption and cost that businesses are motivated to use these technologies in order to ... keep people safer and make them happier employees and increase retention," she said. "While you might only be looking narrowly at a safer workplace, a safer workforce, helping people do their jobs with less strain on their bodies, you may overlook easily the cybersecurity and the attack surface component."

For example, Garber said vests or similar smart clothing can help with "heat-stress prevention" by "alert[ing] you on overheating," or can have "sensors for detecting environmental hazards and weather changes," depending on the risks of the job. "The hope is to reduce fatigue, reduce injuries and reduce overall illness and absenteeism," she said. Smart helmets and glasses are also other examples of this type of tech.

"But as soon as you become intrigued with the upside potential that we just talked about," Gottehrer said, "you have to start thinking [about] cybersecurity, policies, education, reassuring employees that we're not doing this just to track their locations and see if they're working."

She gave the example of a smart vest "that measures the body's orientation," to see "what position" the body is in at a given time, and then uses algorithms to analyze whether posture is safe or unsafe. Such devices can continually monitor and collect data. Gottehrer said this data can be helpful in a construction or warehouse environment where there is a lot of heavy lifting. "But at the same time, it's a little unnerving to think about something is constantly monitoring your posture, and it's not like you can solve the situation with privacy concern by anonymizing the results, because you want to return information to the person it can help."

"If you generalize it, you're kind of defeating the purpose," she said. "Technology returns data that can be given to you as ways to help you improve, but at the same time, something that is going to be interpreted is watching you all the time and measuring you."

Gottehrer said the most important thing with any emerging tech is deploying appropriate guardrails. "Just because you can collect it doesn't mean you should," she said. "If you do that, you better secure it carefully, because if it gets breached, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. And you want to do that cost-benefit analysis and weigh that risk."