H&M was accused of extensive surveillance of employees

The management of the H&M office in Nuremberg paid close attention to the privacy of its employees.

The Swedish fashion giant H&M, the second-largest player on the world market in terms of revenue, was fined 35 million euros. The German authorities accused the company of illegally storing employees’ data in its databases. 

According to the German data protection agency, the Nuremberg office of H&M was closely following its employees’ privacy. It was engaged in data storage, which led to a record fine. 

It has been noted that details of H&M employees’ lives in Germany have been recorded in the office since at least 2014. Employees were required to have additional conversations with management after returning from vacation, or sick leave, after which the information received was recorded in select databases. 

Some managers invaded employees’ privacy under the guise of private conversations while also keeping the information obtained during the conversations confidential. The leak of data from the company’s office first occurred due to a technical error in the fall of 2019. 

In Germany, the storage of employee privacy information has been prohibited by applicable law since 2018. The H&M fine of 35 million euros was a record for the country and the second-largest in Europe after the case against Google in France last year. H&M said that after the incident, they would develop a comprehensive action plan to improve internal audit and training managers’ practice.