Can the boss now read your messages at work?
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Claim
A court decision gives employers the right to check all the messages an employee sends from company computers.
Conclusion
The decision was that privacy rights don’t rule out employers checking whether staff are sending personal messages on work computers, in particular circumstances. It doesn’t directly change UK law, which already allows some monitoring.
On 12 January, the European Court of Human Rights decided that the employers of a Romanian man who checked messages he’d sent at work hadn’t violated his right to privacy.
It’s not obvious that this makes an immediate difference to employees at their desks in Blighty.
Sacked for sending personal messages at work
In 2007, Bogdan Bărbulescu’s Yahoo Messenger account was examined by his bosses to check his claim that he hadn’t used it for personal purposes – which was against the company’s rules.
He was sacked, challenged this in the courts of Romania, and lost. He then took his argument to the human rights court in Strasbourg.
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