A court has decided on whether or not employers can spy on the email addresses of their employees while at work.
A top rights court in Europe has ruled on Tuesday in favour of a Romanian man fired by his employer.
The man was allegedly fired over private messages sent at work,
overturning a previous decision with wide ramifications for privacy in
the workplace.
According to Agence France Presse, AFP, the apex body of the
European Court of Human Rights backed 38-year-old Bogdan Mihai
Barbulescu who said his privacy was violated when he was sacked in 2007
for sending private messages over the Yahoo messaging system.
The decision on Tuesday by the 17 most senior judges at the
Strasbourg-based court in France modifies a ruling in January last year
when the court found that employers were justified in snooping on their
employees.
The judges said that Barbulescu’s bosses and Romanian courts had “not adequately protected (his) right to respect for his private life and correspondence.”
In a judgement published on the court’s website, it said that it
was unclear whether Barbulescu had been warned about the monitoring, or
whether he was aware of the extent of the intrusion into his private
life.
It also said that Romanian courts had failed to determine why the
monitoring measures were justified and whether there were other ways of
checking on him “entailing less intrusion” into his private life.
The case revolves around messages sent by Barbulescu over the Yahoo
messenging platform, which the software engineer was required to use to
liaise with clients.
He was sacked after being found to have also chatted with his fiancee and brother on the system.
He argued that his employer invaded his right to privacy by spying
on messages which included details about his health and sex life.
In an initial decision in January last year, the ECHR ruled that it was not “unreasonable
that an employer would want to verify that employees were completing
their professional tasks during working hours.”
But the Grand Chamber of the court, the apex body comprising the 17
judges, agreed to reexamine the case at Barbulescu’s request.
The judges held a hearing on November 30 last year, at which it
heard arguments from experts and the European Trade Union Confederation.
The union group criticised the initial ruling last year, judging it to be too harsh.
It recommended that a verbal warning should be the first stage of
any disciplinary process with dismissal only possible for repeat
offenders or serious misconduct.
Experts also say that companies should also have a clear policy
governing the use of professional software and the internet during work
hours.
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