Legal use of personal data by employer

It is legal to use by employer of personal data and data recorded on the company's hard drive, who had been made available to its employees and executives after resigning and taking up duties to a competitive enterprise. Decision 1/2017 Plenary Ap.

With no. 1155/2015 unanimous decision of the A2 Political Department of the Supreme Court were referred to the full plenary, due to general interest, the following issues:

of the extent of the constitutional protection of communication, that is, this protection is limited to the time of communication itself or extends to the later stage of it and

If the constitutional protection of communication is applied and if the employee, using his employer's computer, creates and uses, in addition to the e -mail address made by the business, a personal email address, taking measures that exclude access to that of any third party, and therefore sends and receives emails that do not concern the intense sense of private life, but relate to unfair and harmful to the interests of the business in which he works actions.

In this case, the employer asked special experts, accredited at the Ministry of Justice on Cybercrime, to attempt to search and restore the hard drives of her former employees' computers, the deleted files and to classify the results Corresponding folders. These records included not only the company's documents but also (personal) emails and letters from its former employees, which they had addressed to competitors of the company, preparing their departure.

The plenary ruled that the correspondence of former employees of the company is characterized as private as it was intended to serve the personal interests of employees and that it falls into the realm of personal data, despite being strongly linked to the employer's business.

However, the restoration of critical files by the corporate computers they used and their use before a court was lawful because the rights of the employer company for judicial protection in order to protect its business freedom excelled privacy and personal data protection of it's former employees.