Employee Privacy: Guide to US and International Law, Morrison & Foerster LLP

Citation

Nolan, S. (2008), "Employee Privacy: Guide to US and International Law, Morrison & Foerster LLP", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 7 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/shr.2008.37207bac.003

Employee Privacy: Guide to US and International Law, Morrison & Foerster LLP

Employee Privacy: Guide to US and International Law, Morrison & Foerster LLP

Sara Nolan Editor, Strategic HR Review

Employee Privacy: Guide to US and International Law, Morrison & Foerster LLPThompson PublishingISBN: 978-1-933807-16-4

Employee Privacy: Guide to US and International Law, Morrison & Foerster LLP, Thompson Publishing, ISBN: 978-1-933807-16-4,

This is a comprehensive guide to employee privacy laws for HR professionals. It was written by a team of 20 lawyers in the Privacy and Data Security Practice Group at Morrison & Foerster, and edited by Miriam Wugmeister, a partner in the firm’s New York office and head of the Privacy and Data Security Practice.

It has been written to help organizations with employees in more than one country with the challenge of complying with the different laws regulating the collection, use and disclosure of personal information. Despite the enormity of the task, the authors have done a good job in bringing together a huge amount of information and presenting it in a practical and user-friendly format. The guide comes with a folder in which its many pages can be organized using index sheets for easy reference. Rather than taking a country-by-country approach, or analyzing individual laws, it is structured by topic and takes into account the laws in the USA, Europe, Asia and Latin America.

The aim is to organize the data based on the manner in which HR professionals, privacy and compliance professionals and lawyers think about privacy issues in the employment context. It is not meant to be a definitive guide, but rather to help employers identify the employee privacy obligations that will shape policies and procedures. Where appropriate there are checklists and best practice guides and critical privacy laws have been reproduced in the appendices.

Topics covered include:

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  Overview of privacy and data security.

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  Background checks and investigations.

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  E-mail and internet monitoring/video and physical surveillance.

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  Employees’ off-duty conduct.

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  Confidentiality of health information.

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  Medical examinations and drug testing of applicants and employees.

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  Personnel records.

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  Use of social security numbers.

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  Security breach notification requirements.

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  Data security – maintaining an information security program.

This guide is likely to be useful to any HR department trying to cope with data protection laws under multiple jurisdictions. It comes with a user guide on an accompanying CD and the fact that the pages come punched and ready to insert into the folder means that any updates to legislation can easily be inserted into the existing manual.