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Companies have the right to monitor their workers’ online private messages, a court has ruled.

The European Court of Human Rights made the ruling on a case involving a Romanian engineer who was fired after using Yahoo Messenger not only to communicate with professional contacts, but to send messages to his fiancée and brother.

The Strasbourg court sided with his employer that it was “not unreasonable that an employer would want to verify that employees were completing their professional tasks during working hours.”

The judge dismissed the employee’s claim that his right to privacy had been breached in the form of his confidential correspondence being compromised.