Privacy and global employee data transfer: EU data privacy law restricts the international data flow

In 1995, the Directive on Data Protection, which is concerned with the rights and freedoms of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data came into force. The Directive applies to both data of employees and to personal data of other persons. The Member States complied with this Directive by adapting their national laws to its requirements. While the definitions and basic rules for dealing with personal data, criteria for data processing and conditions of data export are subject to EU-harmonized legislation, workplace monitoring as well as questions of codetermination of the employees' representatives depend on national law. This legal situation could change in the upcoming future. In Europe, the development of employment data privacy protection is still in process: it has already been discussed for some time whether data privacy protection at the workplace should be regulated by a special directive. The European Commission has addressed the proposal, but has not yet reached a decision. Principal aim of the European framework will be to apply, specify and complement the principles established by the already existing Privacy Directive in the employment context. With a view to ensure legal clarity and to provide comprehensive protection of all workers the European framework under discussion should refer to the need to inform and consult the workers' representatives. The monitoring and surveillance of workers' behavior and correspondence is an issue of the intended framework as well as the processing of health, drug testing and genetic testing data. Whether a data privacy protection directive especially relating to employees is adopted, will ultimately depend on the scope of the special data privacy rules for employment. If only a few such rules are concerned, they could also be inserted into the existing Privacy Directive.