Based on a recent ruling, employers can now spy on their employees during the work period. Users in Europe should now be wary and make sure that the messages they send to their family and friends via Facebook, WhatsApp or any other online chat messenger are safe for work.

During a recent hearing, the European Court of Human Rights or ECHR has ruled that employers have the right to read private messages sent through a chat software and webmail accounts by their workers during the working hours. The recent move came after judges in Strasbourg ruled a company within their rights to read an employee's Yahoo Messenger chats.

The case involves a Romania worker who was sacked in 2007 after his employer found out that he has been reading his private message during the working hours. The disgruntled worker then asked the court to rule that his employer has breached his right to confidential correspondence when they have accessed his messages.

The messages involved messages sent to his fiancé, brother, and other professional contacts. The said employee lost the case in Romania's domestic courts and has appealed to the ECHR since then. However the judges in ECHR have ruled that the sacked employee has breached his employer's company rules, which is prohibiting the use of the said messaging app for personal conversations.

Having breached this rule, his employer has every right to check whatever he has been up to and whoever he has been messaging during the working hours. The said ruling is now applied to every country that has ratified the European Convention on Human Rights which also includes Great Britain.

According to a statement released by the ECHR judges, the employer involved in the case has acted within his disciplinary powers since the court has found that they only accessed the Yahoo Messenger account based on an assumption that the information in question has been related to professional activities and because of these the access was legitimate. The ECHR also said that they have found no other suspicious information to question their recent findings.

The judges have stated however that unregulated snooping of employers on their employees would not be acceptable. They have already called on a new set of policies to be made by employers that would clearly state what information they can collect and on how these information are to be collected.