FlickrThere’s bad news for anyone who regularly uses Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp at work (so that’s pretty much all of us).
According to new research, on average UK employees are sending up to 100 messages while at work, not realising that their boss could be monitoring what they’re upto.
About 70 per cent of UK workers admit to using email, WhatsApp, text and Facebook Messenger for personal use while on the job, and a large proportion are actually unaware of the regulations surrounding the monitoring of private messages, The Telegraph reports.
Almost half didn’t know that their employer is allowed to snoop on messages sent via company devices.
As we reported in January, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that companies are allowed to read their staff’s private online messages during office hours.
The judgement centred on the case of a Romanian engineer who was fired in 2007 after his company discovered he was using Yahoo Messenger to chat with his fiancée and brother at work.
PexelsThe research also showed that the kind of things people were messaging could also be problematic, with 40 per cent admitting they chatted with a potential new employer, 31 per cent confessed to doing some online shopping and nine per cent said they’d been flirting with co-workers.
So think twice next time you’re sliding into Laura from HR’s DMs, because your boss might be creeping…
