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Amazon’s loss in court over its attempt to shield the source code behind its Just Walk Out technology is a small win for shoppers, but the bigger story is how employers are quietly collecting biometric data from their own workers.
From factories to Fortune 500 companies, employers are demanding fingerprints, palmprints, retinal scans, facial scans, or even voice prints. These biometric technologies are eroding the boundary between workplace oversight and employee autonomy, often without consent or meaningful regulation.
Everyone has to weigh data privacy decisions. Delete social media accounts for data privacy or be isolated from friends and family? Do a retina scan at the airport or risk being the uptight person who slows down security check?
But the questions are becoming way more existential, particularly as they invade the workplace. Workers now have to ask a totally different question: Forfeit data or forfeit income?
Because there’s no federal employment law that gives people the option to consent to biometric collection and use, employers can require employees to undergo scanning systems and other biometric applications.
This legal gap exists because, out of the 20 states with privacy laws that regulate private data collection, some still exclude data collected in employment contexts. So, biometric data protection is largely based on where employees live and work, workers’ rights firm Outten & Golden says.
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