The Protection of Workers' Personal Data and the Surveillance by RFID in Portugal

The way the work is made has been suffering in the lastyears countless changes related with the enormous increase anddevelopment of the use of new information and communicationtechnologies in the work relationship. The theme of privacy andsurveillance of the employer have been turning in a matter ofconsiderable interest and surrounded of great controversy in thelast years all around the world and Portugal is no exception.The technological innovation allows, through severalinstruments as the use of radio-frequency identification, thecontinuous surveillance and monitoring of the workers and newquestions arise in the horizon. These new forms of controlconstitute powerful means of surveillance and of memorization,but also of analysis and of interference in the people’ privacy,and one of the major challenges put today is the regulation of thisnew forms of control in the workplace because the advancementof modern technology has made it possible to collect and storeinformation on a seemingly limitless scale, while also facilitatingaccess to it. And the question that arises before the use of thistechnology is to know what limits should be established. And theanswer is related, it seems, with the principles of data protection,mainly, in Portugal, article 17 of Portuguese Labour Coderelated to protection of personal data and also the PortugueseData Protection Act, Law number 67/98,from 26th October, and,most of all, the legitimate principle, the proportionality principleand the transparency principle.The RFID has increase exponentially in the last years,with countless applications in different sections and with verydifferent purposes, allowing to follow and control not onlyobjects but also people, especially workers, what has beenoriginating several problems and issues in Portuguese LabourLaw related to the protectio