Americans can breathe a sigh of relief for now but if you live in Europe, the European Courts have ruled that bosses can legally monitor employees’ private messages.
We are living in a time where office security policies can block access to some websites while tracking your every device activity. So it should be no surprise that employees often take their work and personal communications off the grid and enjoy conversations on platforms such as Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.
Now doing so could get you into hot water in Europe depending on how you interpret the European Court of Human Rights rule today that suggested employers were within their rights to check any personal communications such as SMS or WhatsApp and even on a personal device if they suspect communications were being made during work hours. European Court of Human Rights:
“it is not unreasonable that an employer would want to verify that employees were completing their professional tasks”
The landmark case involved a Romanian engineer who was asked to create ta Yahoo account back in 2007 to answer clients’ queries. He was then fired after being caught using Yahoo Messenger to message his fiancée and brother during his regular working hours. The crucial aspect of this story is how this communication took place across a company network, and account so is not as black and white as some of the headlines suggest.
It is currently unknown if this new ruling will indeed affect all forms of online communication during work hours or only those that are designated for corporate use but the subject matter has certainly been the focus of a few heated debates. Although some argue the most horrifying aspect of this tale is that any business or individual was using Yahoo Messenger, but it was 2007 after all.
Employers will champion any such rulings, and if you are being paid to perform a role and complete tasks, you should be doing just that rather than sending messages to your friends and family or waste copious amounts of business time on Facebook using corporate network or Wi-fi. There shouldn’t be too many surprises on this front and how an employee uses company resources has long been monitored by bosses.
The interpretation of the new ruling could fool some power hungry bosses into thinking it’s a license to snoop on their staff or look at their personal messages when they see them on a messaging platform during company time. However, the judge also ruled that unregulated snooping on employees would not be acceptable, and called on a set of policies to be drawn up by employers that would inform their employees of exactly where they stand.
Once you begin to monitor personal devices and accounts too, companies would enter a very murky world and would need to tread very carefully around data protection before demanding access to a personal smartphone and the information stored. The rights of the person on the other end of the communication who has no ties to the company and have not agreed to this breach in their privacy also need to be considered.
It seems that workers should take a closer look at their employer’s policies so they are aware of any social media pitfalls they may encounter. Remember, behind the headlines of this landmark case, an employee was using a business account to make personal communication during work time before becoming too concerned or outraged by the headlines.
However, the events have highlighted the very gray area around what we can and cannot do during working hours. Many sit at a desk staring at their PC, and the smartphone in their pocket is essentially another sophisticated computer, and we no longer think when drifting seamlessly from device to device or platform to platform or question if sending that quick WhatsApp message was the wrong thing to do.
Ultimately, if your performance is suffering then anyone reading this would rightly expect to appear on the radar, and our actions could be monitored to learn where we are going wrong. My only fear is this new ruling could be used as a weapon against workers they simply do not like.