The BBC reports the ECHR ruled in the case of Bǎrbulescu v. Romania that a manager had a right to read an employee’s Yahoo Messenger chats sent during work hours. Judges concluded that the worker, Romanian engineer Bogdan Bǎrbulescu, had violated company policy by sending messages to his fianceé via private Yahoo chats.
Bǎrbulescu’s employer prohibited the use of company resources for personal purposes. In addition to monitoring the time he spent chatting, the company also produced “transcripts of messages Bǎrbulescu had exchanged with his brother and his fiancée relating to personal matters such as his health and sex life”, according to court documents.
The engineer’s managers showed him the incriminating transcripts and then terminated his employment “for breach of the company’s internal regulations that prohibited the use of company resources for personal purposes.” Bǎrbulescu sued but lost his case in Romanian courts before appealing to the ECHR.
“The employer acted within its disciplinary powers since, as the domestic courts found, it had 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,” the court’s ruling stated. “The court sees no reason to question these findings… [It is not] unreasonable that an employer would want to verify that employees were completing their professional tasks during working hours.”
The court also found that Bǎrbulescu’s former employer had accessed the engineer’s account “in the belief that it contained client-related communications,” and that the company had committed “no violation of Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life, the home and correspondence) of the European Convention on Human Rights.”
The ruling means companies across Europe must clarify when employees may send personal emails and messages from their work accounts.
“I think employers need to be clear about the reasons about why they are monitoring so people don’t feel there is this blanket Big Brother approach,” Ben Willmott, public policy chief at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, told the Telegraph. “I think this case is just a reminder of the need for clarity and what happens when there is ambiguity.”
