"Bosses reading your emails are not breaching your privacy", 13 Jan 2016

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that a company in Romania did not breach the privacy rights of an employee when it monitored his Yahoo Messenger account.  The man’s employer sacked him in 2007 after presenting him with a 45-page transcript of messages he had exchanged with his brother and fiancée during work hours from a work computer...He complained his employer breached his human right to privacy, but the ECHR concluded it was “not unreasonable for an employer to want to verify that the employees are completing their professional tasks during working hours.”...One of the seven judges, Paulo Sérgio Pinto de Albuquerque, disagreed with the ruling. “Workers do not abandon their right to privacy and data protection every morning at the doors of the workplace,” he wrote. “Even where there exist suspicions of cyberslacking [or] diversion of the employer’s IT resources for personal purposes ... the employer’s right to interfere with the employee’s communications is not unrestricted.”