A scary ruling from the European Court of Human Rights will allow bosses to read employees’ private messages while at work, including WhatsApp.
The ruling came after a Romanian engineer was fired for messages sent on Yahoo messenger. He contested that it was his private space which he used to communicate with his fiance and family, so it was not meant to be accessible to his bosses.
The court six-to-one, disagreed in a ruling that will send panic across Europe as it is binding for every country in the EU.
The sticking point was that reading messages was a way of checking if there were breaches by employees in completion of tasks.
The court however does not make it open season for employees to just snoop on their employees willy-nilly. They will have to draw up company policies to see how this will be executed.
The danger in all of this is that because we are becoming less 8 to 5 societies it means that your employer could check on your phone for use at night at a time when you may have been asked to respond to something after hours.
It will be complicated.
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