My question is what would happen to an employee who refused (as I would) to the collection of their fingerprints. If they'd lose their job, that'd mean they were being subject to coercion and consent was not given.
What’s interesting here is that the data was not collected secretly per se. White Castle used finger prints to unlock computers and access pay stubs, so employees had to know what was going on. The ruling is that they did not ask for and receive consent from those employees for years. The employee in question had been having her finger print scanned since 2004, and they only asked for consent in 2018.
Which begs the question, if they asked and an employee said “no”, what happens? Are they fired? Banned from register work?
Coercion was never a factor in the law. Even if you wanted your fingerprints taken, you can still sue them for taking it without consent. It is a restriction put into place to enforce a practice.
Another example would be medicine, even if you took medicine knowing possible side effects, the maker of the medicine is still culpable if they don't follow FDA rules.
You can't say consent was implied when the law is telling you a definition of what viable consent is in a specific way. You can't just ignore the law and make excuses or blame the employees. On their part, they only have to prove that fingerprints were taken and consent was not. If you are they can just quit, then the entire point of the law is sl they won't have to and instead punish the company.
The faceprint shoplifting example is, when duly considered, a frightening example straight from dystopian cyberpunk -- individuals automatically banned from jobs, stores, private facilities, public spaces -- forever, automatically, under an opaque corporate controlled consumer identification / credit system.
Your employer and industry are so far on the wrong side of the ethical divide that there's simply no way to reconcile ethical standards and what you see as justified non-opt-in faceprint collection.
You're an IT guy who manages your company's MacBooks, including the FileVault institutional decryption key.
A fellow employee is being investigated for a crime, say possession of child pornography. You have no knowledge of what is or isn't happening on the computer.
Your management directs you to cooperate with the Federal Agent, answer questions, and provide technical assistance as required. You refuse without advice of your personal counsel.
End result: You are terminated for insubordination.
Even if that were true (it is not, as far as I can tell), they would know that it will be tracked and could possibly be used against them later. Never make employees choose between a paycheck and following the law.
True, they did make a choice. The nuance I'm interested in is whether a person in this situation would reasonably assume they would lose their job, or promotion opportunities, etc, if they didn't do the illegal task as asked. And if so, does that create a civil liability?
If the company supplied the employee with the “illegally obtained” books, that could be reason to view the situation differently than an employee acting on their own.
Since the company is obtaining + providing these models with 100% of their input data, it could be argued they have some responsibility to verify the legality of their procurement of the data.
I think the way it would work is that the boss himself would send the signature somehow (e.g. on teams) and bosses that don't want their businesses to fall victim would have to ensure that their employees would never accept a call from them outside of the system that allowed the signature check.
That doesn't sound like a Catch 22, that sounds like someone interfering with evidence. The absurd thing is if the company or lawyer would be prosecuted for not deleting the evidence. I'd hope not, cause they didn't do anything wrong if their employee did the wrong thing.
What if the employee knows the action, or results, violate the law? What if the employee is part of an important community or organization in the field that has ethical standards that would be violated and result in the employee's ejection from that community?
There are many reasons why in many engineering fields there's a licensing process and exam, but one of the most important ones, from the employee's perspective, is being able to say "No, I can't do that, I would lose my license".
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