BOSSES FREE TO SPY ON EMAILS

Warning to staff after landmark ruling on use of social media

BOSSES were yesterday given the right to spy on staff emails. In a landmark ruling, the European Court of Human Rights granted them full access to personal messages sent from company computers or smartphones.

The decision came in the case of an engineer sacked for using a social media site while at work. Legal experts warned staff should now assume all their online activity is monitored.

‘This ruling related to personal use of company systems, so we are potentially looking at Facebook and other social media,’ said Claire Dawson of the law firm Slater and Gordon.

‘Employees should be aware that if they have a company device, their employer may give themselves the right to monitor it, including outside of work hours.’

Many firms routinely check staff emails and track the websites they visit – usually to protect commercial information or stop workers trawling pornography sites.

Bosses might also be looking for signs that staff are planning to leave. This is all legal as long as employees are warned in writing, generally in their contracts.

But it is feared unscrupulous firms will exploit yesterday’s ruling to step up their spying.

Alex Bearman, an employment law specialist at Russell-Cooke, said: ‘The safest course of action for employees is to avoid using these sorts of messaging platforms on work devices because who knows if your bosses are watching.’

Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the TUC, insisted staff had a right to privacy in the workplace. ‘Big Brother bosses do not get the best out of employees,’ she added. ‘Staff who are

being snooped on are less productive and less healthy. British workers put in billions worth of unpaid overtime every year. They shouldn’t be punished for occasionally checking private emails and going on social media.’

The Romanian engineer at the centre of yesterday’s case had asked the European court to agree that his employer had breached his human right to a ‘private life…and correspondence’ – enshrined in article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The unnamed man, who is in his mid 30s, had been asked to set up a Yahoo Messenger account for work purposes, but he had expected it to remain private. The company started monitoring his messages after he denied that he had used his work computer for personal matters.

The worker, who had been talking to his brother and his fiancée about ‘very intimate’ issues including his sexual health, was then fired for breaking company rules that stopped staff making personal use of work resources.

For eight days in 2007, the firm accessed both the Yahoo Messenger account it had asked him to set up, and another set up for his own use, under a different ID.

It is not clear how the firm gained access to his passwords, although it could have been through keystroke-logging technology.

It presented him with a 45-page printout of all the personal messages he had sent and made it available to colleagues ‘who had dis- cussed it publicly’. One of the seven judges in the European court agreed with the man that his right to privacy had been breached.

The judge warned bosses should not be allowed ‘unfettered control of employees’ expression on the internet’.

However, the judge was overruled by the other six, who thought that the company was justified in snooping.

‘The employer … accessed the Yahoo Messenger account on the assumption that the information in question had been related to professional activities and that such access had therefore been legitimate,’ they said.

In addition to Facebook and Twitter, employers will now be allowed to monitor personal messages sent on Apple’s iMessage platform, WhatsApp and picture- sharing platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram. This is provided they warn staff sufficiently, again possibly in the small print of their employment terms.

Readily available software means that they are easily able to record whatever their staff are looking at on screen, allowing them to take screen-grabs of Facebook pages and Skype conversations.

‘If you have any device that is company owned, it isn’t yours. Don’t have a private conversation on it,’ said Renate Samson of the lobby group Big Brother Watch.

‘No employee should be in fear of being monitored by their boss. Companies must be clear with their staff about what they consider acceptable in terms of accessing the internet or using work devices.’