Bosses’ right to snoop on staff emails is an invasion of privacy and ignores the way we work

Bosses can look at whatever we do on work devices, as long as this policy is communicated to employees first. Is this a step too far?

By Christian Fuchs

Since Edward Snowden revealed the existence of internet surveillance programmes such as XKeyScore, Prism and Tempora, there have been many discussions of digital snooping and its implications for privacy, freedom and civil rights.

Public discourse has focused on the dangers of the emergence of a surveillance-industrial-complex, in which secret services, global communications corporations and private security companies collaborate.