Control the behaviour of employees in Facebook is lawful. To determine this was the Supreme Court with the judgment 10955/2015 which confirmed the legality of a dismissal occurred as a result of checks carried out on the use of social networks during working hours.
The case involved an employee of a company, already found to spend time in long phone calls and Facebook, who was using its own tablet during working hours for chatting.
To be able to have evidence of this behaviour, a company employee registered a fake profile of a woman on Facebook and through it began to contact the other employee who, on several occasions, made himself available to speak with the false woman during the hours that would have to work.
Once discovered, and then dismissed, the employee filed an appeal against the decision that had upheld his dismissal by stating that “the means used by the company to ensure its telephone conversations over the Internet during working hours is a form of control Remote prohibited by article 4 of the Workers Law and therefore must have considered impermissible and reprehensible”.
The Supreme Court considered instead that it is entirely lawful because it was not a form of workers’ control rather than an instrument of control for defensive purpose because “does not have to verify the exact fulfilment of the obligations arising directly out of the employment, but to protect the company’s assets or to prevent the commission of unlawful conduct” and therefore fell outside the prohibition to which the worker intended to appeal.
In the past, the Supreme Court has deemed lawful control over IT structures business to know the content of e-mail messages sent by an employee outside the company. Also it was found to be legal the use of video filmed at the outside the workplace, by a private investigator responsible for monitoring that were stolen business documents.
The Court also ruled that in this case the legitimacy of control was also supported by the fact that the employee, joining Facebook and decided to use it, had agreed that part of its data and information relating to its profile were public and has voluntarily made available to have conversations with the person who has contacted him.
The defensive control put in place by the employer through the false profile of woman was then intended to find and punish behaviour likely to affect the company’s assets in terms of security of the systems to which the employee was employed and therefore it was deemed lawful.