Woman fired for uninstalling app on company phone that tracked her 24 hrs a day

A California woman has sued her former employer, which fired her shortly after she disabled a GPS tracking feature on her company iPhone. The app was used to monitor employees even on their personal time, the lawsuit alleged.

Myrna Arias has claimed that her boss, John Stubits, at money transfer service Intermex in Bakersfield boasted about monitoring employees’ locations while they were not on the job, according to the lawsuit filed in Kern County Superior Court.

Arias, a sales executive for the company, said she was “scolded” and subsequently fired — even though she “met all quotas during her time with Intermex — after she uninstalled Xora, a mandatory job-management app that was applied to company phones.

“After researching the app and speaking with a trainer from Xora, Plaintiff and her co-workers asked whether Intermex would be monitoring their movements while off duty,” the suit says.

“Stubits admitted that employees would be monitored while off duty and bragged that he knew how fast she was driving at specific moments ever since she installed the app on her phone. Plaintiff expressed that she had no problem with the app’s GPS function during work hours, but she objected to the monitoring of her location during non-work hours and complained to Stubits that this was an invasion of her privacy. 

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