The Legal Boundary and Regulation of Intelligent Workplace Surveillance

Intelligent surveillance has become a normalized management practice for employers seeking to optimize and enhance managerial efficiency. In the workplace context, intelligent monitoring demonstrates, on the one hand, a high degree of concealment in its methods and a comprehensive, boundary-spanning capacity for information extraction; on the other hand, it exhibits a strong intrusive nature, thereby encroaching—at varying degrees—upon employees’ spheres of autonomy and privacy.The legitimacy of employers’ use of intelligent surveillance derives from their right of labor management. In the era of digital intelligence, the exercise of such managerial authority has evolved toward digitalized labor governance, wherein the application of intelligent surveillance within a reasonable scope may be regarded as both lawful and justified. However, when the means or extent of surveillance exceed legal boundaries or the threshold of necessity, such practices may degenerate into violations of employees’ rights to privacy and personal information protection.Accordingly, workplace intelligent surveillance must operate strictly within the constraints of the legal framework. The general principles governing the collection and processing of personal information—namely the purpose limitation principle, the principle of proportionality, and the rule of informed consent—should be transplanted into the workplace setting and further refined to reflect its particularities. By establishing a dual public–private law regulatory system and reconstructing the standards for assessing the legitimacy of intelligent surveillance, it becomes possible to develop a normative system centered on labor standards legislation, incorporating typological regulation, due process regulation, and whole-process supervisory mechanisms. Through this framework, a balanced development between employers’ managerial interests and employees’ individual rights can be effectively achieved.