Employees must be told by companies if their corporate email accounts are being monitored, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.
The ruling was made in the case of a man fired a decade ago for using his work email to communicate with his family, Reuters reported.
The judges decided that the courts in Romania had not protected the private emails of Bogdan Barbulescu because the company for which he worked did not tell him in advance that it was snooping on his email account.
The ruling comes eight months ahead of the General Data Protection Regulation which will become law in the EU on 25 May, 2018. It will define how data protection is strengthened and unified for all individuals within the EU.
{loadposition sam08}The EU judges said in Barbulescu's case, he had not been told about the extent of snooping and the fact that his employer, who was unnamed, might end up examining the contents of his emails.
He was shown the contents of private messages sent to his brother and fiancee to prove that he had violated a company ban on such use of a corporate account. The report said he had told the company he was using the account only for official reasons.
Commenting on the judgement, Stephanie Raets from the Belgian law firm Claeys & Engels Antwerp, told Reuters: "The most important lesson learned from the judgement is that, although an employer may restrict the employees' privacy in the workplace, it may not reduce it to zero."
However, other legal professionals said there was not much new in the ruling as the extent to which employers can snoop on employees' emails was already reflected in privacy laws.
Esther Lynch, confederal secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation, said: "This set of requirements will restrict to an important extent the employers’ possibilities to monitor the workers’ electronic communications.
“Although it does not generally prohibit such monitoring, it sets high thresholds for its justification. This is a very important step to better protect worker’s privacy.”