European Court rules bosses can monitor employees' private messages on WhatsApp and other messaging services

Companies have the right to monitor their workers’ online private messages, a court has ruled. The European Court of Human Rights made the ruling on a case involving a Romanian engineer who was fired after using Yahoo Messenger not only to communicate with professional contacts, but also to send messages to his fiancée and brother. Bogdan Mihai Barbulescu was asked to create the Yahoo account in order to answer clients’ queries. In 2007, he was approached by his employers and told that they had been monitoring his chats over several days, citing the company policy that the service should have been used for work purposes only. He was presented with a 45 page transcript of his messages, including those sent to his fiancée.   The Independent