Clocking in with GPS is not surveillance. Never switching it off is

Ask around whether you can have your crews clock in with their location attached, and the answer comes back the same way every time. Careful, that is surveillance, the ICO will have your head, get legal involved first. So you park the idea and carry on with the paper sheet at the site entrance, the one that proves nothing and that nobody has ever queried, because there is nothing in it worth querying.

Meanwhile someone else is on the phone selling you the opposite. Live tracking of every van, a moving dot on a map, mileage, idle time, a driver behaviour score out of a hundred. Everyone has it, they say, it is all above board, and you sign because you have no reason to doubt them.

Both of those conversations get the problem wrong in the same way. They treat GPS itself as the question. It never was. The question is when the thing decides to look.

What the regulator actually goes after

The ICO’s guidance on monitoring workers, published in October 2023, is worth reading properly rather than in summary. It does not ban location data. It says something narrower and far more useful: pick the least intrusive method that achieves your purpose, be straight with people about it, and do not lean on consent, because in an employment relationship consent is rarely freely given when the person on the other side needs the job.

Then look at what the ICO does when it moves from guidance to enforcement. In March 2024 it issued an enforcement notice and a formal warning to the Home Office over the GPS tagging of people on immigration bail. The finding was not that satellite tracking is unlawful in itself. It was that the department had not properly assessed how intrusive round the clock location data is, had run an inadequate data protection impact assessment, and could not demonstrate that the processing was necessary and proportionate.

Read that back with your own fleet in mind. Continuous tracking, no serious assessment of how invasive it is, no evidence that anything less would have done the job. That is the pattern that gets punished, and it has nothing to do with recording that a two person crew arrived at a client site at ten past seven.

The line runs through the word “when”

A system that switches the location on twice a day, at the start and the end of a job, and stays blind in between, is documenting work. It answers one question, was the job done where and when it was supposed to be, and then it shuts up.

A system that samples every minute answers a different question entirely, which is where is this person right now, and it keeps answering it whether you asked or not. Where they stopped for lunch. Which route they take home. How long they sat at the lights on the ring road. None of that is evidence of anything you can bill for, and all of it is data you will one day have to account for, to the employee, to a tribunal, or to the ICO.

Same satellites, same app, same dot on the same map. The difference is a setting, and somebody in your business chose it. Ask yourself who. If the answer is the supplier’s default configuration, then the supplier has made a legal decision on your behalf, and you are the one who carries it.

The four questions worth asking before you sign

How often does the system record a position, and can that be changed? Can anyone in the office watch a vehicle move in real time, and if so, who exactly? How long is location data kept, and on what reasoning rather than on what habit? And can the whole thing be switched off outside working hours, or on a van that gets used privately at the weekend?

Four questions, none of them technical. They are organisational decisions dressed up as parameters, and in most companies they end up being made by whoever installs the software, simply because nobody claimed them first. Your impact assessment is where the answers get written down, and it is also what speaks for you on the day someone asks.

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Why the tool was built to look away

The moment you put GPS inside a work app, the easy road is to collect everything. Every release adds a feature, every feature adds a field, and one quiet update at a time you end up knowing where somebody spent their Saturday night. GeoTapp was developed down the other road. One tap opens the shift, one tap closes it, the position is stamped at those two moments and nowhere in between, and the name carries the whole story, geolocation plus a tap plus an app.

For years that was the hard part of the sales conversation, because refusing to build features your competitors put on the front of their brochure looks like weakness. It stops looking like weakness the moment a regulator starts asking what you collect and why.

Same map, two directions

Proof of work and following people around use the identical technology. What separates them is a human decision about where to stop looking.

Stop at the client’s gate and you have something to show the customer who swears the crew never turned up. Never stop at all and you have an archive that somebody will eventually ask you to justify. And on that day the company that sold it to you will not be the one answering. How long have you been putting off digital timesheets because nobody could tell you where the line sits?

Sources

Information Commissioner’s Office, “Employment practices and data protection: monitoring workers” guidance, 3 October 2023. Information Commissioner’s Office, enforcement notice and warning to the Home Office on the GPS electronic monitoring pilot, 1 March 2024 (breaches of Articles 5(1), 5(2) and 35 UK GDPR). UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018.