Employee privacy a grey area

Kiwi employers’ rights to monitor staff emails are unlikely to be impacted by a landmark European court ruling, experts say.

Businesses across the European Union are on notice that they must specifically warn employees in advance if they intend to monitor messages sent through their work email accounts.

The European Court of Human Rights ruling in Strasbourg followed a complaint from a Romanian, Bogdan Barbulescu, who reportedly exchanged messages concerning his health with his fiancee through a company Yahoo Messenger account.

Those messages were read and printed out by his employer as evidence he had breached its policy, which was not to use work accounts for personal use.

The European court ruled that Romanian judges, in backing Barbulescu’s employer, had failed to protect his rights under article 8 of the European convention on human rights to ‘‘private life and correspondence’’.

Privacy Commissioner John Edwards was not immediately able to say what the outcome would have been had the lawsuit been brought in New Zealand, but employment lawyer Peter Cullen believed Barbulescu would have had less success in front of a New Zealand court.

Both thought the case was unlikely to set a precedent here.

Cullen said Kiwis could probably assume employers were able to see what websites they visited on work-issued devices and networks, but were unlikely to look through their communications unless they had reason.

Edwards said employers had to be reasonable. A ‘‘good faith’’ obligation on employers, for example not to be overly intrusive, was ‘‘pretty well established in law’’. –with Reuters