Cool, so your boss can now snoop on your Whatsapp conversations

The Romanian engineer, Bogdan Barbulescu, had argued that his right to a private life had been breached by his employer, and that messages from a second personal Yahoo Messenger account had also been read.

“However, employers can legitimately monitor employee communications during working hours, if their policies are clear and employees expressly agree to them”.

If you are going to send personal messages during your work day, you should be aware that your boss is legally entitled to read them.

Barbulescu’s messages were sensitive and extremely personal in nature.

If you use private messaging on social media during working hours, your boss has permission to read personal messages sent during this time but your own personal devices remain off limits.

Tim Wilson, Human Rights Commissioner in Australia, said that the European court’s decision and ruling does not really affect Australia.

The ECHR also upheld the first judgement, stating that while it did not find it unreasonable that an employer would want to verify that employees were completing their professional tasks during working hours and noted that the employer had accessed Bărbulescu’s account in the belief that it contained client-related communications.

In the case of work email accounts, employers will usually have some sort of “master key” that allows them to gain access to employees’ individual accounts.

“You have to assume an employer is looking over your shoulder”.

The case is no precedent for the idea that bosses can now monitor employees’ “private messages”, as reported by The Independent. As a result, “only targeted surveillance in respect of well-founded suspicions of policy violations is admissible, with general unrestricted monitoring being manifestly excessive snooping on employees”. He was told that the company policy stated that the messaging program should only be used for work purposes only, something that he clearly did not do.

The full court document takes into account other instances where workers considered their employers to have impinged on their right to privacy – including the case of Copland vs The United Kingdom, which Thomson Reuters’ Practical Law service describes as a manual on how not to monitor your employees’ communications.

The engineer in question was caught sending messages to his wife and brother on Yahoo Messenger from his work device in 2007 and his job was promptly terminated.

In fact a new ruling by the European Union could grant your bosses access to every single one of these sneaky chats you’ve been having during work time. However, the decision does not deal with this scenario.