Employers must tell staff of email checks
Organisations must tell employees in advance if their work email accounts are being monitored, without unduly infringing their privacy, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) said in a recent ruling, defining the scope of corporate email snooping.
In a judgment in the case of a man fired 10 years ago for using a work messaging account to communicate with his family, the ECHR judges found that Romanian courts failed to protect Bogdan Barbulescu’s private correspondence because his employer had not given him prior notice it was monitoring his communications.
The ECHR ruled by an 11-6 majority that Romanian judges, in backing the employer, had failed to protect Barbulescu’s right to private life and correspondence.
The court concluded that Barbulescu had not been informed in advance of the extent and nature of his employer’s monitoring or the possibility that it might gain access to the contents of his messages. The company was not named in the ruling.
The ECHR also said there had not been a sufficient assessment of whether there were legitimate reasons to monitor Barbulescu’s communications. There was no suggestion he had exposed the company to risks such as damage to its IT systems or liability in the case of illegal activities online.
“This set of requirements will restrict to an important extent the employers’ possibilities to monitor the workers’ electronic communications,” said Esther Lynch, confederal secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation.