Europe’s highest human rights court has ruled that employers are permitted to monitor their workers’ online communications – including personal chats to family – during working hours.
The European Court of Human Rights made this ruling after a Romanian engineer appealed verdicts by his country’s courts that his company had not violated his right to private correspondence. The firm had fired the engineer in 2007, after learning of his use of Yahoo Messenger against company policy.
According to news agency Agence France-Presse, the engineer had been conversing with his fiancee and brother, but the company had barred Yahoo Messenger being put to such personal purposes.
The ECHR insisted that it was not “unreasonable that an employer would want to verify that employees were completing their professional tasks during working hours”, before noting that the company had accessed the messages while assuming them to be strictly with professional contacts.
ECHR judgements apply to all countries that have ratified the European Convention on Human Rights.