Help · Choosing LiteEntry

Is it legal to track employee attendance?

Recording when someone was at work is legal in most places. What matters is what you collect, whether employees know, and how you use it.

Recording attendance is legal in most countries, and has been for as long as employers have kept timesheets. What the law cares about is what you collect, whether employees know about it, and whether it is proportionate to the purpose.

LiteEntry records a name, a time, and a place — the minimum a check-in produces. Nothing else.

What “tracking” means, and what it does not

The word covers a wide range. An app that runs in the background and reports continuous location is a different thing from a system that records a deliberate tap at a door, and the law tends to treat them differently.

LiteEntry records a check-in when somebody scans the code. That is the only moment anything is captured. Nothing runs between check-ins, there is no background location, and the phone is not asked for contacts, photos or files. If geofencing is switched on for a location, the phone’s GPS position is read at that one moment and nowhere else.

The legal exposure that makes employers nervous tends to come from the other kind: covert location tracking, biometrics, persistent monitoring. LiteEntry does none of those.

What the law usually requires

Rules differ by country, sector and whether a works council or union agreement applies. The common thread across most systems:

Employees must know attendance is recorded. Scanning a code at a door is a deliberate act. It requires a screen and a phone and a tap. That visibility is why it is a different legal conversation from background or passive tracking.

The data must be proportionate. Name, time, place — the check-in record — is proportionate to knowing who was at work and when. LiteEntry does not record movement within a building, break activity, or anything outside the check-in moment.

People have a right to see their own records. LiteEntry members can see their own attendance any time, on the same page they check in from.

Biometrics are the higher bar

Facial recognition and fingerprint scanning turn an attendance record into biometric data, which brings consent requirements, storage obligations, and a higher legal threshold in most privacy regimes.

LiteEntry does not use photographs or facial recognition, deliberately. The check is a rotating code, a Google account, and optionally location and office network. That combination verifies identity and presence without touching biometric data.

What this page cannot do

Every employment situation is different. Works council agreements, national regulations, and sector-specific rules apply on top of general privacy law, and this page is not a substitute for legal advice where any of those are relevant.

What it can say: LiteEntry collects the minimum that a check-in produces, records nothing in the background, uses no biometrics, and makes the record visible to the person it is about. Those properties are worth having in any conversation you need to have about introducing attendance recording.

See what data we collect for the precise list, or can an employer require an app on a personal phone for the related question about installation requirements.

Still stuck? Try the demo — most questions here are quicker to answer by pressing the thing than by reading about it.