Did you know that New York State passed a new law mandating employers to notify their employees about electronic monitoring? The new law, A.430/S.2628, went into effect on May 7, 2022.
Any employer that electronically monitors phones, emails, and/or internet usage must give prior written notice of that monitoring to all new employees and obtain a written acknowledgment (which may be in electronic form) from those employees before monitoring them.
Employers do not have to provide written individual notice to current employees (hired before May 7, 2022), and existing employees do not need to acknowledge that their communications are being monitored. However, employers must post clear messages regarding electronic monitoring in publicly available spaces, such as breakrooms regarding the practice.
The law does not apply to employer monitoring processes that are:
- designed to manage the type or volume of incoming or outgoing email, voicemail, or internet usage;
- not targeted to monitor or intercept the internet usage, voicemail, or email of a particular individual; and
- performed solely for the purpose of computer system maintenance and/or protection.
Based on these exceptions, electronic monitoring processes such as spam filters, data loss prevention software, and firewalls do not fall within the purview of the legislation.
While there is no private cause of action for violations, the law is enforced by New York’s Attorney General. Any employer in violation of the law can be fined $500 for a first offense, $1000 for a second offense, and $3,000 for a third or following offense. In addition, failing to notify a new employee can result in a $3,000 fine for each violation.
For the time being, employers should prepare forms of notification and acknowledgments and anticipate re-printing their employee handbooks. To help you get started, here is a templated notification/acknowledgment form given to us by one of our trusted partners, Ethan Allen Workforce Solutions. Of course, feel free to change it per your business best practices.
How do employees feel about this?
They don’t like it. No surprises there.
Suppose your company culture does not embrace employee activity monitoring, but you’d still like to ensure employee productivity. In that case, there are plenty of tools that help limit distractions like notifications, and that can temporarily block apps and websites to allow better focus. Your employees can choose to activate these to aid productivity when they need a boost. You’ll find some of these tools in your Microsoft 365 subscription.
So that means more tools at no extra cost.
If you want some local IT suggestions personalized to your business, call us at (845) 299-9173. We can help. Meeting Tree Computer has helped provide IT solutions to Hudson Valley business owners and their teams be their most productive since 1999.
