Court ruling means companies can now read employees' private messages

If you use private online messaging while you are at work you might want to think again.
Employers can now read private messagesEmployers can now read private messages
Employers can now read private messages

A ruling by The European Court of Human Rights means that companies NOW have the right to monitor the private online messages of their staff.

The ruling was made on a case involving a Romanian engineer who was fired for using Yahoo messenger to send messages to family members as well as professional contacts.

The worker who was sacked by the company in 2007 asked the court to rule that his employer had breached his right to confidential correspondence when it accessed his messages.

The European Court of Human Rights dismissed the engineer’s argument that the company had violated his rights.

The Strasbourg court said: “It is not unreasonable for an employer to want to verify that the employees are completing their professional tasks during working hours.”

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