Authority for Privacy: privacy and Skype

With its order no.345 of 4 June 2015, the Authority for Privacy, ruled on the issue of remote control of workers’ activities. Specifically, the order in question confirmed that the employer cannot keep Skype conversations of employees, not even to document conduct harmful to the company including if the employee leaves the Skype icon enabled on his workstation computer. The Authority based such ruling on the constitutional rules of secrecy covering correspondence, valid also for electronic and digital communications exchanged by employees for their jobs. Any controls cannot be hidden (the essential characteristics of data processing must be made known to the workers) and cannot determine the collection of personal information, including not pertinent, of a sensitive nature or referring to third parties. The Authority’s intervention is significant, in addition to being able to understand the situation offered by the case in question, it makes it possible to create the framework for the implementation procedures for controls by the employer on instruments used by workers, including considering the recent rewriting of article 4 of Italian Law no. 300/1970 as a result of Italian Legislative Decree no. 151/2015.