Digital communication, including instant chat, is a part of daily life for many of us and many use these platforms while at work. However, do you know that Private Messages At Work Can Legally Be Read By Employers if they have certain rules? Private messages at work can legally be read by employers.
Check your employer’s rule book as they may have disallowed personal internet use at work or the use of certain messaging platforms for personal messages. If so, they may well be within their rights to read your personal messages. A court case has led to a new European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling that UK judges must take into account.
Private Messages At Work Can Legally Be Read By Employers: The Court Case
An engineer, named Bogdan Barbulescu, lost a court case in Romania’s domestic courts and appealed to the ECHR after his employers read his personal messages and sacked him in 2007. He was sacked because the employer had a rule that personal messages must not be sent during work hours. Mr Barbulescu had been using Yahoo Messenger for personal and work messages. The messenger app had been set up on one of the employer’s devices for the purpose of sending work messages.
As he had been using Yahoo Messenger for personal messages as well as professional communications, his employer sacked him as he had broken their rule. The judges, sitting in Strasbourg ruled that as Mr Barbulescu had breached his employer’s rules, the company had a right to sack him. As his employer believed they were accessing a purely work Yahoo Messenger account, the judges ruled they were not in the wrong. They added that Mr Barbulescu had had a prior warning that the company could check his messages.
A judge stated that it was not “unreasonable that an employer would want to verify that employees were completing their professional tasks during working hours…The employer acted within its disciplinary powers since, as the domestic courts found, it had accessed the Yahoo Messenger account on the assumption that the information in question had been related to professional activities and that such access had therefore been legitimate. The court sees no reason to question these findings.”
The Implications
UK judges must be taken into account the ECHR’s decision but it is not bound by it. It also seems that this recent court is not going to have any new implications for UK law. Lilian Edwards, professor of internet law at Strathclyde University, said the judgment was in line with UK law and past cases.
However it is important to note how the law impacts employers and employees. All employers should make clear any rules that would allow them to check on employees’ online activities. One of the judges said, “All employees should be notified personally of the said policy and consent to it explicitly.”
However the blanket ban on personal internet use while at work was deemed unacceptable by one of the judges in this case and Lillian Edwards regards these blanket bans as unreasonable due to employees needing to retain a right to a private life while working especially as people worked longer hours.
Lillian Edwards also added, “In this case, the employers say clearly that you are not to use the internet for anything but work. Although it is not popular, it is completely legal. The employer seems to have played this by the book.”
Sally Annereau, a data protection analyst at the law firm Taylor Wessing, said, “This judgment underlines the importance of having appropriate and lawful employee-monitoring policies in place and making sure both that they are communicated to employees and that they are adhered to by the employer.”
Our advice to employers is to make sure all employees are aware of and agree to any rules you have. Our advice to employees is to check your employer’s rules and stick to them.
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