This might be legal, but it's still bad management. If you don't trust your employees and you don't think you can evaluate the results of their work, in this case if things are clean, that's on you as a manager to figure out. Tying it in to the process like this and you end up getting false flags when they spend a long time cleaning a mess, or reward them for not cleaning sufficiently to hit their movement metrics.

A small minority of work can't easily be directly evaluated.

If I hire a security patrol company, and they contract to provide a patrol that will visit twice a night and walk around the building, nonperformance would be almost undetectable.

Punch clocks were standard 100 years ago. The nightguard was supposed to press the button on clocks dotted around the building when he passed them. No app on the personal phone required.

If a robbery or damaged occured you would know. If you audited the cameras. If you had a second employee.

Tracking location by the second isn't necessary and can be defeated with a rc car and a piece of tape by a 6 year old or robot (the tommy robot from the 80s would be perfect) or drone if you want to stay upto date.

There may be cases sure, but this isn't one of them.

Security patrols have little RFID style markers around the building they scan to prove when they were there. That's standard practice at least in Europe.

Fwiw, it's not tracking location

> The app, called Blip, generates a geofence — a virtual boundary, created by the employer using GPS — that detects when an employee enters or leaves.

In the article it says the app claims not to track location outside of the geofence, but it's unclear exactly what information is being tracked and where it is stored. I'd really be interested to compare the data transfer inside and outside that geofence.

What is that if not location tracking?

I understand location tracking as being tracked, i.e. someone knows where I am at any given time. Here it's a binary information. Inside the fence (place of employment) or not. Once you're out, all the employer knows is that you're not at work.

Don't get me wrong, I despise this but it's not tracking strictly speaking.

> Inside the fence (place of employment) or not.

But to do that you have to share location permissions all the time with the app. And you have to trust it enough to give it those permissions.

Also here's a solution with no app and no location tracking: detect when a phone has connected to on-premise WiFi.

>Also here's a solution with no app and no location tracking: detect when a phone has connected to on-premise WiFi.

I was about to suggest the same. Always-on location tracking is an extremely lazy and disrespectful way to replace a punch card.

Here's your replacement app:

- When arriving at work, you open the app while on employer's WiFi and tap "Start my shift"

- Before leaving work, you open the app and tap "End my shift" (but this is not required)

- During your shift, the service tries to periodically validate that your phone is still on WiFi (via LAN pings, silent push notifications that trigger checkins, or background polling)

- During your shift, if the service can't verify that your phone is still on the WiFi for 30+ minutes, it sends you a push notification asking you to open the app and check in. Otherwise, it ends your shift.

- If there's some WiFi dead zone in the workplace where they need to work for more than an hour, give the employee the option to respond with a one-time GPS location instead of joining the WiFi.

Boom. This was not hard. Doesn't even need internal infrastructure; can do this whole thing based on WAN IPs.

How should anyone know this? Is this app open source?

My company wanted me to use the intuit TSheets app for clock in/out. This would do a similar thing with geofencing but would also notify me during times I wasn't at work that it was generating a geofence for my current location even though I wasn't even clocked in.

Told my manager I simply wouldn't use it and why and he gave me permission to use the webapp on the company issued laptops.

Last thing I need is my manager seeing me traversing the city drunk at 2am or whatever. I'm not on their time so whatever I'm doing is none of their business.

Are we sure that's all it's doing, or is geofencing just the primary function of the app? Does the app have no ability to save/track coordinates, and do the terms of service/privacy policy reflect that?

That is location tracking.

Geofencing vs. continuous location tracking is an implementation decision about power efficiency only. For data privacy and permissions, these are not distinguished.

A user cannot elect to grant "geofencing only" permission. And even if they could, users have no way to audit the geofence coordinates to verify that they are being used in the described manner.

Even if implemented exactly as described, it's not hard to see why this can still leak non-work-related personal data. If an employee walks past their workplace at 2 AM, that's not information that an employer should have.

You know you need to track location for that to work, right?

Technically no, the client does not have to send the exact location to its server at all times to determine if the device is within the fence.