European Court Rules Companies Must Tell Employees of Email Checks (reuters.com)

Companies must tell employees in advance if their work email accounts are being monitored and such checks must not unduly infringe workers' privacy, the European Court of Human Rights ruled on Tuesday. From a report: In a judgment in the case of a man fired 10 years ago for using a work messaging account to communicate with his family, the judges found that Romanian courts failed to protect Bogdan Barbulescu's private correspondence because his employer had not given him prior notice it was monitoring his communications. Email privacy has become a hotly contested issue as more people use work addresses for personal correspondence even as employers demand the right to monitor email and computer usage to ensure staff use work email appropriately. Courts in general have sided with employers on this issue.

Comments

Email? IM?

[nine-times]

From the summary, I had assumed that this was a standard case of a company accessing a person's email that was sent through that company's own mail server. I was pretty much ready to side with the employer. If you send an email through your company's mail server, you should expect that someone might view that email. Even if the employer isn't snooping, there are any number of reasons why someone at the company may need to review your work emails. However, the article states:

The company had presented Barbulescu with printouts of his private messages to his brother and fiancée on Yahoo Messenger as evidence of his breach of a company ban on such personal use.

So that makes it sound like this guy was using a personal Yahoo Messenger account. So that kind of takes me in the other direction, in favor of the employee's right to privacy. As a general rule, I don't think that your company should have the right to access your personal email/IM accounts, even if you happen to access them on work devices.

However, that doesn't really explain how they got access to his chats, unless they were stored on his work computer. I don't feel comfortable saying that a company shouldn't be allowed to review the contents of a company-owned computer. And this is further complicated by the fact that the employee stated, in writing, that the account was being used solely for work purposes. In that case, I could see an argument that the account is a work account, not a personal account, and so the employer should be allowed to access it.

In any case, I think there's some space between "what an employer should be legally allowed to do" and "what an employer should do". Even if employers can spy on employees and review private email, they should try to avoid reading anything that's not business related.