Thursday the Hamburg Commission for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, state authority that monitors violations of privacy in Germany, fined the Swedish clothing company H&M, owner of thousands of stores around the world, for 35.3 million euros for spying on her employees.
Johannes Caspar, who heads the commission, said H&M has collected private information about its employees working at a customer service center in Nuremberg. The information ranges from harmless details to details of people’s private lives, including family matters and religious orientation.
According to Caspar, this information could only be accessed through an internal network by only about 50 managers of the Swedish company. The information would be used to have detailed employee profiles so that they could choose which job to assign them. The data breach was discovered when, by mistake, information was briefly visible to the entire corporate network.
H&M said the data collection system used in Nuremberg was not part of the company guidelines. However, the company took responsibility for the violation and apologized to the employees. H&M has also decided to pay compensation to its workers who have suffered the violation of their privacy and to take new measures in the future to prevent such abuses from happening again.
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