Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2013, as a news item. The ruling and the statement that no law clearly separates employer monitoring from workers’ privacy reflect Spanish law at that time; later case law, such as the Barbulescu ruling, and Spain’s 2018 data protection law changed the picture.
The debate has reopened, not only over the use of social media at work but also over companies using spyware to monitor how employees use their computers. For now, the High Court of Justice of Andalusia has given its backing to the use of spyware to monitor company computers.
The most recent case involves several workers at a major hotel in the province of Granada who, according to the newspaper Ideal, were fired for chatting on Facebook and browsing leisure websites during working hours, even though the company had strictly forbidden it.
After being dismissed, the workers went to court, where at first instance the dismissal was ruled unfair. But the company appealed to the High Court of Justice of Andalusia (TSJA), which has finally ruled the dismissal fair. In other words, the court sided with the company.
The TSJA also backed the company’s use of spyware to monitor employees’ browsing habits.
Cases like this, which are more common than the ones that come to light, show that there are still no clearly defined laws separating the employer’s right to control company computers from the employee’s right to privacy of communications. Today both rights are recognised by law, even though in cases like these they clash.
Likewise, although we have often talked about the importance of bringing social media and business together, the truth is that for some companies, having employees in certain roles browsing the internet or chatting on Facebook is nothing but a distraction and has nothing to do with social media work.
For other companies, on the other hand, separating the professional from the personal when it comes to social media would be quite difficult.
Once a company has made it very clear that using social media at work is strictly forbidden, the question is whether using spyware is right. There are opinions both for and against.
Featured image: Jebulon, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
