As the data protection regime in China continues to evolve, so do the individual privacy rights of employees. A Beijing appellate court recently rejected an employer’s ability to use—without the employee’s informed consent—deleted WeChat data from a company-issued device in a legal proceeding to support the termination of an employee’s employment contract by demonstrating misconduct. The Beijing appellate court’s view is likely to be followed more broadly, so employers should adjust data protection policies and consents to reflect broader forms of personal data that the company may collect.
It is increasingly common for employers to provide employees with company devices (such as laptops, mobile phones, and/or tablets) for work-related purposes. To protect proprietary information, many employers will use a number of different methods to monitor the activities on the company devices and preserve/recover data.
A company will often seek to use the data obtained from a company device as evidence when there is an internal investigation or dispute, particularly when the matter involves the employee to whom the company device is assigned.
In a recently reported case, the Beijing courts ruled that deleted WeChat records of an employee on a company computer cannot be admitted if recovered without the employee’s consent, [1] which poses new challenges to the collection/processing of employees’ personal data in China for various purposes, including human resources...
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