In recent years many companies have abandoned traditional time clocks in favour of app-based attendance systems built on employee geolocation. Workers clock in and out from their own smartphone or tablet, and the system associates with each punch, in addition to the time, the geographic position detected at that precise moment via GPS, Wi-Fi or mobile data.
The solution is designed above all for people who work away from a fixed terminal, or where installing one is not possible. This is the case for workers moving between construction or industrial sites, for agents and technicians on assignment, for employees working remotely (smart working) and for companies with several offices that want to collect attendance data centrally. Besides verifying that the punch really takes place at the intended workplace, the system automates timesheets and helps prevent abuse.
The question arises naturally: is recording the position of those who clock in permitted by law? And, above all, before activating the system, is a union agreement or authorisation from the Labour Inspectorate required?
Is authorisation from the Labour Inspectorate necessary?
The issue revolves entirely around Article 4 of the Workers' Statute (Law No. 300/1970), which distinguishes between two different situations.
Paragraph 1 concerns “audiovisual systems and other tools from which the possibility of remote monitoring of workers' activity also derives”. These may be used only for organisational and production needs, for workplace safety or for the protection of company assets. They also require a prior agreement with the trade union representatives or, failing that, authorisation from the Labour Inspectorate.
Paragraph 2 exempts from these constraints the tools that workers use to perform their duties and tools for recording access and attendance. For these, neither a union agreement nor authorisation is required, but the obligation to adequately inform the worker about how the tools are used and to comply with privacy legislation remains unchanged, as provided for in paragraph 3.
At first glance, therefore, an app that records entries and exits would appear to fall under paragraph 2. The point is that GPS is not a simple badge: by detecting the worker's position, it adds to the recording of attendance a possibility of monitoring that a badge does not have. This is why the prevailing view goes in the opposite direction. Moreover, with Circular No. 2 of 7 November 2016, the National Labour Inspectorate had already clarified that geolocation systems are, in principle, an “added element” to work tools and therefore fall under paragraph 1.
The safest course, then, may be to activate geolocated clock-in only after signing an agreement with the RSA/RSU (workplace union representatives) or, failing that, obtaining authorisation from the Inspectorate. The application should be submitted to the competent local Labour Inspectorate or, for companies with production units in several territorial areas, to the head office of the National Labour Inspectorate. A recent ruling by the Court of Cosenza, however, has called this approach into question, although, as we shall see, less than it might seem at first glance.
A EUR 50,000 fine overturned: the Cosenza case
With ruling No. 972 of 1 July 2026, the Court of Cosenza annulled the EUR 50,000 fine imposed by the Italian Data Protection Authority (the Garante) on a public body in Calabria (decision No. 135 of 13 March 2025). The body used an app to record the attendance of staff working remotely (smart working) and, according to the Authority, this use violated the principles of the GDPR (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) and the Privacy Code.
The system worked as follows. Employees clocked in remotely at the start and end of their shift, and the app recorded their geographic coordinates at that moment. During working hours the body could carry out spot checks, contacting the worker by phone and requiring an additional geolocated clock-in, subject to consent, within an agreed availability window. In the case at hand, two of these checks had shown that an employee was far from all three locations from which she was authorised to work. Disciplinary proceedings followed, and the employee responded by lodging a complaint with the Garante.
The Court, ultimately, sided with the body, classifying the app as an attendance-recording tool under paragraph 2, while acknowledging that its technical potential makes the safeguards of paragraph 1 appropriate.
Why did the Court classify the system under paragraph 2?
The judge looked at how the app was used in practice, not at what GPS could theoretically do. The system did not follow the worker's movements during the day; rather, the position was recorded only at two specific moments, namely when clocking in and out, and during the spot checks, which were always preceded by a phone call.
For the Court, therefore, there was no constant, continuous and indiscriminate monitoring of the employee's activity. The app fulfilled, remotely, the same function as a badge reader at the office entrance: recording attendance. The only difference is that, once clocking in moves outside the company premises, detecting the position becomes the only way to verify that the worker is actually where they declared they would be.
The Court also rejected the Garante's argument that recording the position would be excessive in relation to the purpose. On the contrary, it considered it the only suitable tool for balancing the worker's flexibility with the employer’s power and duty to verify that the agreed workplace rules are respected. The Garante, the judge specified, can verify that the data collected are relevant and proportionate, but cannot second-guess the employer's organisational choices, an expression of the freedom of private economic initiative guaranteed by Article 41 of the Constitution, nor judge a system solely on its potential invasiveness.
The limits of the Cosenza ruling
It should be stressed that the ruling is not a general green light for GPS-based apps, nor does it authorise skipping the step with the unions and the Inspectorate. It is a decision on a specific case and the assessment remains tied to the concrete characteristics of the system: the same tool could prove unlawful if it tracked the position continuously, retained the data for a long time or made it accessible without limits.
There is also a detail to bear in mind. What made the system lawful was the set of safeguards adopted by the body: union agreements, information notices to employees, individual consent and limited access to data. In other words, the Cosenza body had in fact signed the union agreement. The same judge, while bringing the app closer to paragraph 2, observed that its technical potential suggests adopting the safeguards of paragraph 1, and described the agreement with the unions as a condition for the admissibility of the tool. The ruling therefore shows that a system built with all the safeguards holds up even under judicial scrutiny. As for consent, the judge gives it a weight that the Garante and the European Data Protection Board (Guidelines 05/2020) tend to deny in the employment relationship, owing to the imbalance between the parties: for this reason it is inadvisable to base the processing on the employee's consent.
Obligations for the employer
Anyone wishing to adopt a geolocated clock-in system must therefore act on several fronts.
The first is the union agreement or authorisation from the Labour Inspectorate, to be obtained before activating the system. In the agreement or application it is advisable to describe precisely the purposes, how the app works, the moments when the position is detected and any intermediate checks.
The second is the information notice to workers under Article 13 GDPR, to be provided before the processing starts. It must clearly state who the controller is, what data are collected, for what purposes and on what legal basis, who can access them (including the app provider as processor), how long they are retained and what rights the worker has, including the right to lodge a complaint with the Garante. A complete notice, accompanied by clear instructions on how the app works and on the planned checks, also satisfies the obligation under paragraph 3 of Article 4 of the Workers' Statute, which under which the data may be used only if workers have been adequately informed about how the tools are used and how checks are carried out.
The third is designing the system in accordance with data minimisation (Article 5 GDPR) and data protection by design (Article 25 GDPR), which require the system to be conceived from the outset to collect only the data strictly necessary.
Finally, the need for a data protection impact assessment (Article 35 GDPR) must be verified. When employee geolocation is used, carrying one out is almost always advisable, and in many cases a genuine obligation. The list of processing operations subject to mandatory impact assessment adopted by the Garante (decision No. 467/2018) includes, in fact, processing carried out in the employment context with technological systems, geolocation included, from which the possibility of remote monitoring derives.
If your company uses, or is considering, a remote clock-in system with geolocation and you want to verify its compliance with the GDPR and the Workers' Statute, the Argo Business Solutions team can support you through this process. Write to us via the contact form or send an email to info@argobs.com.