While I’m working at home, can my employer require me to keep my laptop camera on?

Under employment law, an employee is obliged to comply with any reasonable instruction. Asking an employee to have a camera in their home at all times raises considerable privacy concerns and is unlikely to be considered reasonable as it places the employee under constant surveillance.

Having a camera in a workplace for security and monitoring purposes and insisting on having one on in an employee’s home are very different things. The employee would quite rightly have a heightened expectation of privacy in their home.

Principle 4 of the Privacy Act says the means of collection should not be unfair or unreasonably intrusive(external link). Insisting that an employee who is working from home keep their laptop camera on is likely to be a breach of this principle. An employer can only collect personal information when doing so is necessary for a lawful purpose (see principle 1). An employer should not collect information just because they can. Instead they could look at other ways keeping in touch with employees working remotely and gauging their work progress.