According to a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, employers have the right to monitor their workers’ online private messages.
The Strasbourg court sided with the employer of a Romanian engineer who was dismissed from his job after using Yahoo Messenger to communicate with his fiancée and brother while at work.
The Independent reports:
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Bogdan Mihai Barbulescu was asked to create the Yahoo account in order to answer clients’ queries. In 2007, he was approached by his employers and told that they had been monitoring his chats over several days, citing the company policy that the service should have been used for work purposes only.
He was presented with a 45 page transcript of his messages, including those sent to his fiancée.
The Strasbourg court sided with his employer that it was “not unreasonable that an employer would want to verify that employees were completing their professional tasks during working hours.”
The judge dismissed the Barbulescu’s claim that his right to privacy had been breached in the form of his confidential correspondence being compromise
Rulings of the European Court of Human Rights are binding to countries which have ratified the European Convention on Human Rights, including the UK.
Lawyer Michael Burd, Head of Employment at London firm Lewis Silkin, told Bloomberg: “This decision is significant for a number of European countries. There’s been a very strict division between employers’ ability to look at private stuff and employers’ ability to look at company stuff and this decision will break that down.
“What’s significant about this case is that they were allowed to use the content, not simply the fact of using Yahoo.”
Niamh Harris
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