Email & Online Chat Surveillance By European Bosses Not IllegalA ruling by The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) last week means that companies in Europe are within their Rights / it is not technically illegal for them to read their workers’ private messages sent via chat software and webmail accounts during working hours. How The Ruling Came About The ruling came as result of a case where a European employer discovered that a worker, a Romanian engineer called Bogdan Barbulescu, was using Yahoo Messenger for his personal contacts as well as his professional ones. The employer made the discovery by actually reading a log of his messages on the Yahoo Messenger account that he had set up for work and also by reading the messages from his second personal one. The device used to send the messages was owned by the employer and the employer had already banned its staff from sending personal messages at work. What About the Law Here in the UK? Britain is one of the countries that have ratified the European Convention on Human Rights and therefore technically the UK has agreed to abide by the ECHR rulings that involve them. As far as the domestic courts go however, in the UK judges must take into account the ECHR's decisions but are not bound by them. What Could ‘Not Illegal’ Surveillance Mean For Your Business? For businesses it is important to be fair e.g. not imposing a complete blanket ban on personal communications as these are often necessary to some degree at work in order to manage modern life. An Increasing Number of Examples Online More and more reports of workplace surveillance of this kind can now be found online and they can help us get an insight into the detail of what a ruling like the recent one could actually mean for both employer and employee. |