Currently, clocking in when arriving and leaving work is something mandatory that any company must implement in order to correctly record its hours. One of the most common methods to carry out this signing is biometric control system at the entrance, especially from larger companies or institutions. Now, these systems can cause problems for your companies.
The legislation currently undergoes many changes, and that is why right now the fingerprint registration system to clock in or out would be failing to comply with the rules established by the AEPD. And this is a problem, because in the end can lead to different fines for the company, as stated in Audens.
Your company will no longer be able to register your fingerprints
If we look at the precedents, we can find a Supreme Court ruling in 2007 where this technology that was not limited by any regulation was viewed favorably. And even article 20.3 of Royal Decree 2/2015 also protects entrepreneurs by allowingadopt the most appropriate surveillance system to verify that the worker complies with his hours.
But the problem arrived in 2016 when the well-known General Data Protection Regulation was published where this fingerprint recognition system was considered a “special category”, due to the sensitivity of the data it collects such as our fingerprints. Although, since this data is only intended to identify the employee, it can still be passed off as legal. Another issue would be to biometrically identify the employee, where it would be a special category. Two differentiated terms that benefited the recognition system in this case.
Although in April 2023 there is no escape from this system. The European Data Protection Board unified the authentication and identification criteria within the GDPR stating that: “Although both functions (authentication and identification) are different, both relate to the processing of biometric data related to an identified or identifiable natural person and, therefore, constitute a processing of personal data, and more specifically a processing of special categories of personal information
From that moment on, fingerprint data They are considered to be of special character, and it will not be able to be used to verify the identity of the workers, even if they have their authorization. In this way, except in special cases such as security, fingerprint or facial recognition cannot be used and is prohibited.
This forces, logically, all companies where the fingerprint recognition system is currently used, to use another method that adapts to the legislation. If you do not do so, and if a complaint is filed, the AEPD may end up sanctioning you for not complying with the law. And we already know that in terms of data protection the fines are somewhat high.
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