A European court ruling has made clear that bosses can spy on their employees. But the ruling really just points out the wide range of the current law — which allows bosses to spy on their employers in almost every circumstance.
The ruling revolved around a Romanian engineer who was fired after his boss looked in on Yahoo Messenger conversations and saw that he had been using it to communicate with his fiancée and brother. It found that the engineer couldn’t appeal under the European Convention on Human Rights and that his right to privacy wasn’t infringed.
The ruling confirms once again that bosses have huge powers to snoop on the conversations of their employees — whether or not they have anything to do with work.
So long as the monitoring is related to the business, the equipment being used is provided for work and the employer has told workers that their communications could be monitored, employers are able legally to look in on conversations.
The Citizens’ Advice Bureau makes clear that the limits aren’t really very limiting at all. The allowed circumstances cover “almost every situation where your employer might want to monitor your electronic communications, except where the monitoring is for purely private or spiteful reasons almost every situation where your employer might want to monitor your electronic communications, except where the monitoring is for purely private or spiteful reasons”, it writes.
The monitoring must happen for one of a long list of reasons for it to be lawful. But that includes broad things like checking that work is being done properly and that people aren’t using computers or the internet for their own purposes.
Bosses aren’t allowed to monitor people at work in secret, by using things like hidden cameras, in all but a very limited number of cases. Data protection law says that such monitoring should only ever happen in the case of serious crime, like drug dealing in toilets.
The rules on monitoring are usually written in an employees’ contract. That will usually make clear that communications could be intercepted and that workers might be punished depending on what is found there.
