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Ever since revelations in May that smartphones track the location of their users, location privacy has been a red hot issue in virtually every forum -- except the U.S. workplace. In June, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review a federal circuit court decision holding that the federal government's warrantless use of 24/7 location tracking for more than a month violated the Fourth Amendment rights of a criminal suspect. The Wall Street Journal dubbed June 15, 2011, "location privacy day on Capitol Hill" after two bills were introduced to limit the use of location data by industry and by law enforcement. And, in the European Union, the Article 29 Working Party, which is responsible for providing guidance on the application of the European Union Data Protection Directive, recently published its "Opinion 13/2011 on Geolocation Services on smart mobile devices." While none of these developments directly implicate the U.S. workplace, U.S. employers should closely monitor the location privacy debate, particularly given their increasingly common reliance on GPS-enabled smartphones and vehicles to track employees. To learn more about recent developments in location privacy and implications for multinational employers, please continue reading at Littler's Workplace Privacy Counsel blog.

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