ONE of the most fundamental rights guaranteed under the Philippine Constitution is one’s right to privacy. The essence of privacy is the “right to be let alone.” The right to privacy, citing the revered Mr. Justice Brandeis in Ople v. Torres, is considered as “the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.”
In this day and age, because of the want of barriers in the sharing and availability of information across the various platforms of science and technology, it is truly challenging for anyone to expect, much more ensure, that one’s right to privacy is upheld. As held in Ople v. Torres, “x xx [a]ll the forces of a technological age—industrialization, urbanization and organization—operate to narrow the area of privacy and facilitate intrusion into it. In modern terms, the capacity to maintain and support this enclave of private life marks the difference between a democratic and a totalitarian society.” Notwithstanding this guarantee of protection by our laws, it begs the question—does one’s right to privacy hold the same fundamental protection in the context of business and work?
To begin with, the constitutional guarantee (of the right to privacy) is not a prohibition of all searches and seizures but only of “unreasonable” searches and seizures. Clearly, the question of privacy must be considered in light of the factual circumstances of each case and the environment by which the expectation of privacy is present or absent. Hence, in Social Justice Society v. Dangerous Drugs Board, the Honorable Supreme Court held that, considering that the office or workplace serves as the backdrop for the analysis of the privacy expectation of the employees and the reasonableness of drug-testing requirement, the employees’ privacy interest in an office is, to a large extent, circumscribed by the company’s work policies; the collective bargaining agreement, if any, entered into by management and the bargaining unit; and the inherent right of the employer to maintain discipline and efficiency in the workplace. Their privacy expectation in a regulated office environment is, in fine, reduced; and a degree of impingement upon such privacy has been upheld. Taking into account the foregoing factors, i.e., the reduced expectation of privacy on the part of the employees, the compelling state concern likely to be met by the search, and the well-defined limits set forth in the law to properly guide authorities in the conduct of the random testing, the Honorable Supreme Court held that the challenged drug-test requirement is, under the limited context of the case, reasonable and, ergo, constitutional.
Similarly, in Pollo v. Chairperson involving a government employee who alleges that his right to privacy was violated by the search and seizure of certain files in a computer officially assigned to him by reason of his office as Chief of Mamamayan Muna Hindi Mamaya Na division of the Civil Service Commission (CSC), the Honorable Supreme Court ruled that the relevant surrounding circumstances failed to prove that he had an actual expectation of privacy. Petitioner did not allege that he had a separate enclosed office, which he did not share with anyone, or that his office was always locked and not open to other employees or visitors. Neither did he allege that he used passwords or adopted any means to prevent other employees from accessing his computer files. The CSC, then, had implemented a policy that put its employees on notice that they have no expectation of privacy in anything they create, store, send or receive on the office computers, and that the CSC may monitor the use of the computer resources using both automated or human means. The Honorable Supreme Court voiced further that a search by a government employer of an employee’s office is justified when there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that it will turn up evidence that the employee is guilty of work-related misconduct.
In fine, a person’s right to privacy is far from unbridled, much more absolute. It is always assessed and weighed against other rights of the different stakeholders in society.