Staff surveillance: Is the answer to take your own devices into work?

It's official: you can be fired for emailing on the company's kit, and time. Nick Duerden fears a bosses' backlash

Big Boss is watching you: there is no clear line between acceptable and unacceptable levels of surveillance (Getty)

As any physiotherapist will tell you, we spend most of our lives these days at our desks. And we do so in places of employment that, often in these post-recessionary times, are under-staffed and over-stretched. The consequence is as inevitable as it is unavoidable: everything we do now, we do at those desks between that most mythical of concepts: nine-to-five.

We mostly fulfil our working duties, of course, but we also organise the weekly shop and, particularly in January, browse likely summer holiday destinations.

We update our Facebook status, and we send the occasional tweet. We see a pair of boots on a discount website that we simply must have, and throughout the day we keep up with friends, spouses and bits-on-the-side via text or WhatsApp.

And until recently this was all perfectly fine, or at least we presumed it so. Not any more. A legal case became public this week in which a Romanian man had been sacked by his employer for sending a succession of private emails – some of which concerned his sexual health – while at work.

The man was convinced that this constituted wrongful dismissal, but the European Court of Human Rights judged otherwise: employers are now perfectly entitled to read personal messages sent on private messaging platforms during working hours.

While this predicted an outcry from privacy campaigners (and human beings in general), it also offered what might just be conclusive proof of a modern world now ludicrously over-monitored, in which every move is recorded. It'll be our thoughts next.

Nevertheless, the EU maintains that screen activity during work hours on phones or tablets that have been provided by work can be freely monitored.

Employers defend themselves thus: they need to be aware of any inappropriate conduct in employees; to know about general slacking, and whether, by spending too much time perusing job websites, workers might be considering pastures new. "None of us should ever assume that what we do online during working hours or when using devices owned by our employers is private," says Dan Nesbitt of the lobby group Big Brother Watch. "But equally, no employee should be in fear of being monitored by their boss."

And yet they – or, rather, we – increasingly are. Last week, it was reported that staff at the Daily Telegraph had arrived at work one morning to find a black box discreetly installed beneath their desks. The so-called OccupEye monitors heat and movement generated by a person's legs – or, more pertinently, the absence of them. The workers feared it was a warning: beware the over-long toilet break.

And even the BBC, that bastion of HR kowtowing, has been accused of "spying" on its staff when it was forced to admit that nearly 150 staff email accounts have been monitored over a two-year period. The Beeb countered by suggesting that this was a rare occurrence indeed, and took place only in "exceptional circumstances where reasonable".

Paranoia in the workplace is rarely pretty. "Companies must be clear with their staff about what they consider acceptable in terms of accessing the internet or using work devices," Nesbitt says, adding that the judgment in the Romanian case, which ultimately found no "straight answer", should not be seen as an opportunity for any company to assume that surveilling their staff's use of personal communication tools is acceptable.

One potential outcome of the ruling is that we will all spend a lot more time on our own devices during working hours, which could well prompt a scenario that resembles secondary school guidelines: confiscation upon arrival, returned upon departure.

Well, they say our school days are the best days of our lives...