Coronavirus and data: Nkf’s analysis
Dealing with Coronavirus pandemic, companies have to implement measures to prevent contamination amongst their employees. These actions involve data’s collection, analysis and share in order to comply with health and safety regulation. Niederer Kraft Frey writes a client news on the topic. According to the firm:
- Companies should only collect the necessary personal data (e.g. the existence of Coronavirus symptoms, information on recent professional and non-professional travel to risk countries and close contact to persons who have recently been to risk countries and/or show Coronavirus symptoms).
- The legal basis for collecting health and travel data is the legal obligation basis. The applicable data protection, labor, health and security laws will contain indeed some legal obligation on the company to ensure the employees’ health and safety that justifies measures to limit the spreading of the Coronavirus.
- The employees should receive a privacy notice prior or at the moment of collection setting out the type of data that will be collected, the purpose, whether it will be shared with third parties.
- Collections with sensitive personal data disclosed to third parties need to be registered with the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner.
- Hospitals and other public or private health care institutions as well as laboratories and medical personnel are subject to special reporting obligations under the Swiss Epidemics Act.