German luxury carmaker Daimler has come under fire for carrying out blood tests on potential employees. A leading privacy advocate has condemned the practice as illegal and called for the information to be deleted.
The automobile concern has defended the procedure as “completely normal” and denied any legal violations.
Daimler spokeswoman Dominique Albrecht said health checks and blood tests had been taking place for the last 30 years with the consent of the works council at the time. The tests only take place in the final stages of the job selection process, she said .
But the deputy head of Schleswig Holstein’s data protection center, Marit Hansen, told the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper that Daimler’s policy breaks “all existing data protection regulations.”
“It is clearly illegal. The data has to be deleted and all those affected have to be informed,” Hansen said.
Read more on Deutsche Welle.