Employers are technically free to monitor workers remotely. And on this point it is useless to appeal to the Privacy Code since, unfortunately, the rules concerning the protection of personal data and confidentiality in the employment relationship are limited to referring to art. 4 of the Workers' Statute or exactly the rule that the government has reformulated.
In order to operate lawfully, investigative agencies must not encroach on the supervision of the reserved work activity, by art. 3 of the Workers' Statute (i.e. for purposes of protecting company assets), directly to the employer and its collaborators.
There was the ISF who were accused of falsely reporting visits to doctors. The evidence consisted of the testimony of the private investigators hired by the company to tail the employee. The Cassation confirmed the sentence of the Court of Appeal which found private investigators unreliable.
However, a sentence of the Cassation (Cass. Civ. n. 16196/2009) declares legitimate the checks carried out directly or through one's own hierarchical organization or through external personnel (e.g. investigative agencies) against an employee aimed at verifying the correspondence of the kilometers actually carried out to cover the routes indicated and those shown in the expense reimbursement request.
Regardless of the Jobs Act, the crime of stalking does not exist in Italy. Hiring a private investigator for this purpose is not against the law. You can spy on a person and also secretly follow them. But under two conditions:
1)- that a condition of anxiety and fear for one's own safety is not created in the spied subject. In this case it borders on the crime of harassment or, worse, stalking;
2) - that the shadowing or espionage activity does not take place in the residence of the spied subject or in the places adjacent to it such as the garden, the garage, the condominium parking lot, etc. With or without the Jobs Act, the use of data collected by the private investigator for disciplinary purposes is permitted.
Basically what matters for the stalked person is to notice the shadowing and that precisely because of this shadowing a disturbance with fear or anxiety arises. To prove the "disturbance" call the police and report the fact.
