In this digital day and age, it is not unusual to wonder whether your employer is able to take a sneaky look at your computer files, emails or phone activity without your knowledge.
According a RTBF article quoting experts, all employers must communicate the company's policy on access to equipment to all employees. The level of this will depend on the sensitivity of material and the need for access but in all cases, transparency on these policies is mandatory.
"Technically speaking, from the moment you have a computer with a portal that is permanently open, the employer has access to all the activities on the computer," a professor of digital strategy at the Brussels Management School ICHEC told RTBF.
"But what is really fundamental is that the employer communicates to the employee what type of information they will have access to."
Are things different in Belgium?
In Belgium, the national collective agreement No. 81 protects the private lives of employees with respect to controls on electronic on-line communications data. The labour agreement specifies that valid reasons are required in order to access an employee's data beyond this agreed level.
These reasons include preventing illegal activity and ensuring the protection or security of the company, or when there are suspicions that the employee is not respecting the company's rules. In all cases, the employer must adhere to two principles: transparency and proportionality.
When can an employer go beyond the agreed levels of access?
"If, for example, you are in hospital and are responsible for a very important tender, but you are unconscious and cannot log-on, accessing your emails is considered a proportionate action," Etienne Wéry, a lawyer specialised in digital technology, told RTBF. "In this situation, without extraordinary access the whole company would be at risk."
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"If, on the other hand, you are on holiday and your employer cannot wait for your return and they access your emails without telling you, just to move things along faster, then the employer would be liable."
The experts added that if an employee wants to store personal data or files on a work computer, putting these in a folder marked 'private' would give them extra protection: accessing such a folder, purely because of the nature of its title, would require the employee to be present when the file is opened or if absent, the employer would need the permission of a judge to access it.
