Companies must tell employees if emails being monitored, court rules

Companies must tell employees if their work emails are being monitored, the European Court of Human Rights ruled on Tuesday in a landmark privacy case.

Companies must tell employees if emails being monitored, court rules

By Alastair Macdonald

Companies must tell employees if their work emails are being monitored, the European Court of Human Rights ruled on Tuesday in a landmark privacy case.

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 had failed to protect Bogdan Barbulescu’s private correspondence, because his employer had not given him prior notice it was monitoring his communications.

The company had presented him 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. Barbulescu had previously told his employer, in writing, that he had only used the service for professional purposes.

The European court, in Strasbourg, ruled by an 11-6 majority that Romanian judges, in backing the employer, had failed to protect Barbulescu’s right to private life and correspondence.

The court concluded that Barbulescu had not been informed, in advance, of the extent and nature of his employer’s monitoring, or the possibility that it might gain access to the contents of his messages.

The court also said there had not been a sufficient assessment of whether there were legitimate reasons to monitor Barbulescu’s communications. There was no suggestion he had exposed the company to risks such as damage to its IT systems, or liability in the event of illegal activities online.

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