A resolution of the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) confirms that the practice consisting of include employees in WhatsApp groups.
Membership of the labor WhatsApp group is considered by the AEPD “essential means of communication for work”
This is a very common custom in many workplaces in which subordinates are added to WhatsApp groups by bosses or supervisors. The resolution of the AEPD indicates that even despite not having prior consent or that the telephone number added to said group is for personal use, it is behavior that complies with the regulations on personal data protection and does not imply an invasion of personal privacy space as it is a strictly work WhatsApp group.
The position of the AEPD in this regard is that this type of work group is considered covered by the employment contract and collective agreements as a means of labor communication, even though the explicit consent of the worker is not available for the company sends you communications through this method.
The origin of this AEPD resolution is in a logistics company where a WhatsApp group was created for employees to report the location of the delivery vans and who was assigned each route. The company required the presence in said group of all the distributors and also prevented them from leaving that group.
The AEPD considers that in this case the data processing carried out is minimal and that adding employees to a WhatsApp group for work activity management is in accordance with the principles of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). as data processing is not considered excessive and has a specific, specific and limited scope purpose.
In this case, moreover, it was a small logistics company, so since it is understood that its resources are limited, it is understood that the company did not provide mobile phones to the delivery drivers and instead used as a number to add to the group those of the personal lines of the employees, assigning the nature of “essential means of communication for your work” to communication through mobile and WhatsApp group.
This consideration seems to contradict other previous resolutions of the AEPD that considered the inclusion without consent in WhatsApp groups contrary to the regulations, but the defining and differentiating element in this case is the prior membership of a labor organization of the person included in the list. group.
