Most of us are guilty of sneakily using online messaging services at work.
But this worrying news means we will be thinking twice about discussing our office crush with our roomies on messenger during working hours.
A new EU court ruling means that your boss has every right to look through your private messages, and can even terminate you for misuse of work hours.
Europe’s Court of Human Rights (ECHR) made the ruling after a Romanian engineer was fired for using Yahoo Messenger to communicate with both colleagues, and his fiancee and brother.
The court ruled that it was not “unreasonable that an employer would want to verify that employees were completing their professional tasks during working hours” and dismissed the employee’s claim that his boss had violated his confidentiality by reading his messages.
The ruling will have major implications for the way workers use smartphones and computers at work, particularly when company policy prohibits the use of messaging for personal purposes.
Anyone else reminded of when your teacher asked you to read the note you were passing aloud?!
