A telemarketer refused to keep his webcam on for nine hours a day while working from home and was fired the next day — a Dutch court ruled the demand invaded his privacy and ordered his employer to pay him roughly €75,000

A camera that stayed switched off cost a Florida software company about 75,000 euros.

It belonged to a telemarketer working from the small Dutch town of Diessen, employed since January 2019 by Chetu, an American software firm that at the time ran a Dutch office in Rijswijk. On 23 August 2022 he was told to join something called the Corrective Action Program, which meant staying logged in for his whole shift, sharing his screen and leaving his laptop camera on. He shared the screen. The camera stayed dark.

His objection was brief and entirely unlegalistic. Court filings quoted by The Register record him saying he was not comfortable being monitored for nine hours a day, calling it “an invasion of my privacy” and noting that his laptop activity was already visible to management.

Two more instructions followed, each firmer than the last. On 26 August he was dismissed on the spot, the stated reasons being refusal to work and insubordination.

Three days from the first instruction to the sack.

What the company argued

Chetu’s case, set out in the published judgment of the Court of Zeeland-West-Brabant, was that watching a remote worker through a webcam is no different from a manager walking past a desk. Performance software already sat on the man’s laptop, and that was not considered enough. Chetu wanted to see him working.

Nobody from the company turned up to make the argument in person, as TechCrunch noted, so it went undefended.

What the judge decided

Ruling on 28 September 2022, the subdistrict judge in Tilburg found that ordering an employee to keep a camera running for a full shift conflicted with his right to respect for private life, and that nothing had been offered to justify it. An unreasonable instruction cannot be unreasonably refused, so there had been no refusal to work and no grounds for summary dismissal.

Data protection law dropped out early. On the understanding that no footage would be recorded, stored or used for anything, the judge treated the monitoring as falling outside data processing altogether, and tested it directly against Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, alongside Strasbourg case law holding that filming staff at work, covert or not, is a serious intrusion into private life. Had the images been kept, the analysis would have looked quite different.

One much-quoted line deserves care. Coverage including a report in Fortune presented the claim that all-day camera tracking is disproportionate and not allowed in the Netherlands as a finding of the court. In the Dutch record it sits among the employee’s own submissions. What the judge actually held was narrower, and sufficient: this instruction, to this man, in his own home, breached Article 8 with no justification advanced.

Why the sum was so large

Almost none of the money was a penalty for the privacy breach. The largest slice, 50,000 euros, was a billijke vergoeding, an equitable award Dutch judges reserve for employers whose conduct in ending a job has been seriously culpable, with a wrongful summary dismissal among the standard triggers, as the Amsterdam employment firm Workx Advocaten explains. Privacy is why the sacking failed. The sacking is what got billed.

Around that sat roughly 8,375 euros for ignoring the notice period, close to 9,500 euros in statutory transition payment, more than 2,700 euros in unpaid wages, 23 days of untaken leave, the 8 per cent holiday allowance and some 585 euros in costs, all itemised by NL Times. His non-compete clause was lifted as well, leaving him free to walk to a competitor.

How common all-day camera rules are

Is this a bizarre one-off or a policy plenty of people are quietly living with? A survey of 1,000 business leaders at mostly remote companies, commissioned by ResumeBuilder in March 2023, found 37 per cent required staff to sit on a live video feed, and that 93 per cent of those firms had somebody monitoring it, usually for four hours or more a day.

The same survey found 73 per cent had dismissed workers on the strength of monitoring data, and 69 per cent had lost staff who would not accept it.

One survey is one survey. It polled American executives, it relied on self-reporting, and executives describing their own management habits are not a neutral instrument. Treat it as a temperature reading rather than a census.

Where the line actually falls

Whatever this settles, it settles in one jurisdiction, on one set of facts, at the lowest rung of the court system. Article 8 offers nothing in Florida, where employment is generally at will and can end without a stated reason, subject to the usual exceptions for discrimination, retaliation and whatever a contract says.

What the case supplies is a price tag on a boundary that remote-work policy has been drifting across without much thought: supervising the work is one thing, keeping a lens open in somebody’s house for the length of a shift is another. A Dutch judge has now looked at that question once, and the employer left lighter.