There are times when office workers use private messages to communicate with friends and family, and even with fellow employees during office hours. However, a court has ruled that bosses can now read these private messages if they are sent during office hours.
According to the Daily Mail, one incident that can be labelled as the stem of this ruling is the case of a Romanian engineer who was using Yahoo! Messenger at work. "The judges ruled that a Romanian company was within its rights to read deeply personal messages one of its engineers, sent over Yahoo Messenger whilst he was supposed to be working," says the Daily Mail.
The Romanian engineer was talking to his brother and fiancee about very sensitive and personal issues. However, because he was doing so during work hours and because work resources, the court believes his boss had the right to read these intimate conversations. Legal experts have recently offered sage advice to British office workers because of this incident. They say that you should work under the assumption that your employer can monitor each and every move you make in the office.
They also advised office workers to not use any pieces of technology for personal use if their employer was the one who provided these gadgets. They said that those should not be used for personal reasons even well after office hours. "'The safest course of action for employees is to avoid using these sorts of messaging platforms on work devices, because who knows if your bosses are watching," says Alex Bearman of the Russell Cooke law firm.
A lot of employers support this ruling. "This decision is significant for a number of European countries. There's been a very strict division between employers' ability to look at private stuff and employers' ability to look at company stuff and this decision will break that down," Michael Burd said, head of employment at Lewis Silkin, in an interview with Bloomberg News.
