The Information Commissioner’s Office publishes new guidelines regarding the use of biometric data by businesses together with an enforcement notice against Serco Leisure.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) discovered that community leisure trusts and a branch of the outsourcing business Serco Leisure were processing over 2,000 employees’ biometric data illegally at 38 recreation centers throughout the United Kingdom.
According to the watchdog, fingerprint scanning and facial recognition software are frequently employed to track employees’ attendance and subsequently pay them for their time.
The ICO discovered that the operator of the recreation center had not provided a clear alternative to the workers, nor had they demonstrated why these measures were superior to “less intrusive” ones like ID cards.
In order to improve awareness of the technology and areas where users potentially run afoul of it, it disclosed case specifics concurrently with the announcement of new guidelines on companies’ use of biometric data.
