The European Court of Human Rights ruled that companies must inform their employees if they monitor their emails.
In a landmark privacy case, the European Court of Human Rights ruled on Tuesday that companies must make sure employees know in advance about their work emails being monitored
According to Reuters, in a case involving a man named Bogdan Barbulescu, who was hired 10 years ago by a company and used the company's messaging account to communicate with his family, judges found that Romanian courts failed to protect his private correspondence because his company had not informed him in advance that it was monitoring his communications.
The company had presented printed documents with the employee's correspondence with his brother and his fiancée, as evidence of the violation of the company's ban on using email for personal use.
The European Court of Strasbourg ruled by a majority of 11-6 that the Romanian judges, who covered the employer with their decision, had failed to protect Barbulescu's right to privacy.
