The Circuit Court has ordered Ballymaguire Foods Limited to pay an employee €2,000 after finding that showing identifiable CCTV footage of him at a workplace meeting infringed his rights under the GDPR and caused non-material damage.
Judge John O’Connor’s judgment, delivered on 11 July 2023, concerns a data protection action under section 117 of the Data Protection Act 2018. The employee, Arkadiusz Kaminski, had sought damages over the further use of footage recorded at the factory. The court’s award was for non-material damage; the judgment records no claim for loss of employment.
The footage was shown at a March 2019 meeting of managers and supervisors discussing food quality and safety practices. The company said the clip illustrated workers moving from a low-care area to a high-care area and was used to identify corrective actions. The meeting covered several incidents and was not focused solely on Kaminski. He was not at the meeting, having been rostered on the night shift, and learned of the clip from colleagues afterward. He did not face disciplinary consequences.
The company initially disputed that Kaminski could be identified in the footage, but conceded at trial that he was identifiable. The court also found a lack of clarity and transparency in the company’s data protection policies. Of four documents discussed at the hearing, the 2018 policy referred to using images for training, while the employee who devised the training said she relied on a 2016 CCTV memo and a 2011 security procedure. The judgment noted that the employee’s first language was Polish and the policies provided to him were in English.
The company did not plead a legal basis for the processing, although it later relied in submissions on legitimate interests. The court found no legitimate interest assessment had been carried out to identify the interest, establish whether the processing was necessary, or balance it against the employee’s rights and interests. It concluded that the employee’s implied consent to training use was unclear.
In his evidence, Kaminski described feeling mocked and humiliated, increased stress at work and sleep problems. The court accepted that colleagues’ “slagging” led to serious embarrassment and some sleep loss, and found a causal link between the infringement and non-material damage beyond mere upset. It considered him a truthful witness and said the effect was short-lived, with no long-term impact on his employment. No medical report supported the claimed harm.
The court also noted that the footage remained on a communal work computer without password protection for two weeks, creating a significant risk, but found no indication that unauthorised people accessed it. The €2,000 award was for the harm the court found proved in this case.