Fit-bitting the dog

摘要

On January 12, 2016, the European Court of Human Rights Supreme ruled that Romanian engineer Bogdan Barbulecu's employer was legally entitled to read his Yahoo correspondence with his fiancee during the workday (Rushton, 2016). According to the court, the company assumed that any monitoring it did would be of work-related content and, therefore, that it was not "unreasonable for an employer to want to verify that the employees are completing their professional tasks during working hours". The ruling, indeed the underlying case, raises many questions, not only about an individual's right to privacy in the workplace but also about the extent and nature of electronic surveillance by employers. Employers argue that they obtain a great deal of useful information about overall and individual productivity in their enterprises, particularly for employees in white-collar operations, but the public outcry on the publication of the court's ruling suggests that this is a highly contentious area.