Do employers actually read your private work chats?
By Tom Haynes
I hate it when TikTok makes me think of work. But last week on my pre-bedtime scroll it did exactly that.
“You don’t have 100 per cent privacy at work when using company technology,” consultant Erin Jackson, told me from my phone screen. “Devices at work – chats, texts, all that stuff – they are not your personal things. It can come out. They can review it.”
It got worse, as another TikToker – a former cybersecurity consultant no less – quickly chimed in. “Uhmm yeah. Don’t say anything on whatever program your company uses for internal communication that you would not want to be read out in your performance review or in court,” he said. Uhmm yeah is right. Workplace chat platforms have been commonplace in startups for years, but in a post-Covid world messaging services like Slack and Teams are ubiquitous.
On the surface, it doesn’t seem that shocking that your employer can parse your conversations on platforms it literally pays for you to use. Those in the public sector have it worse – as their communications are subject to Freedom of Information requests. Even their Whatsapps aren’t safe, as the Sue Gray inquiry proved.?
But something about bosses being able to spy on their employees’ private messages really yucks my yum. Besides, these TikTokers are American, surely your friend and mine, GDPR, prevents bosses in the UK from snooping on your Teams chats for the sake of it.
Sadly, it would appear that they can – and do – as I found out when I opened my Twitter DMs for horror stories.
“I once had an employer who had a member of staff read through all staff communications on Skype and report back to him,” said one worker. “We all got hauled into the office one day about excess usage of memes and he even sacked one employee who was insulting the boss’s wife.”
Another said: “Early in my career a manager threatened to fire half the team after breaking into our Slack DMs. I had assumed no one could read them and it was just extremely violating that they took it upon themselves to do that.”
It transpired the team was simply moaning about a toxic working environment – and while a formal disciplinary hearing never happened, doubtless those Slack messages would have been fair game.
The rules of engagement around online work chats are rarely clear in employee contracts, and in all honesty, it seems very open to abuse by nightmare David Brent-types. As Emma Bartlett, Partner at employment law firm CM Murray says: “Sometimes they will also say work chats can only be used for business purposes, but that is less common now because people spend so much time at work there is incidental use of work systems for personal matters.
“However, usually there will also be policies warning staff that the employer retains the right to monitor the use of its IT equipment, so staff are in theory forewarned that they could be monitored.”
But – and here’s the kicker – Bartlett adds: “Sometimes, the policies are admittedly not there, but the employer does it anyway.”
It makes sense if you are plotting to somehow defraud your employer that they can spy on you a bit – a fun amount of spying if you will. But the legal waters are murky regarding whether your boss can reprimand you for simply whining about your job over Skype.?
Tania Goodman, partner and head of employment at Collyer Bristow, says: “It’s very hard to believe that an employer could successfully argue that a policy of monitoring general chat between colleagues would be a reasonable intrusion on the employee’s privacy, especially as monitoring to this level could likely release data which is confidential and sensitive to the employee.”
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Bartlett, meanwhile, isn’t convinced. “I would say it’s borderline. Gossiping about managers can deeply affect the culture of an organisation, which may result in talented staff leaving, or engender a culture of negative banter that gives rise to allegations of unlawful discrimination,” she says.
There is a certain ‘the house always wins’ vibe to this stipulation. All your employer has to do is justify that your spicy memes are damaging the company culture and therefore the business as a whole, and that’s that.?
Even if you make the case that the intrusion of privacy isn’t justified, by that point the jig is up: your boss has seen your G-chats and has therefore seen your soul. All this to say that if you want to slag off your boss, do it in handwritten notes.
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Great piece Tom Haynes !