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Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Employers warned on e-mail spying
A new ruling which said a college had breached a woman’s privacy by secretly monitoring her e-mails, means employers cannot spy on staff, say legal experts.
Lynette Copland, who works at Carmarthenshire College in west Wales, successfully sued her employer for breaching the Human Rights convention. Mrs Copland said there had been a “clash of personalities” with Mr Wrentmore, who left the college shortly after the episode for reasons of ill health and who died in January.
It was argued the monitoring was to determine whether Mrs Copland was using the college’s facilities for “personal purposes.” But the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the surveillance without her knowledge “amounted to an interference with her right to a private life”. At the time of the offences there was no general right to privacy in English law but the implementation of the Human Rights Act in 2000 legally protected privacy rights in domestic law.
Liberty said the ruling, on 3 April, meant employers would have to make employees aware if their communications could be monitored and there would have to be a good reason for such monitoring in every case.