Need help? Call 0345 838 4074 Register Login

Privacy and monitoring

Staff who are using their homes for working have a right of privacy out-of-hours and need to be able to separate their working and home lives. Times when they can or cannot be contacted on work issues should be agreed.

If you're able to monitor their use of your equipment and systems, you should take great care before deciding to do so. The key matters to consider are below:

  • Monitoring should only be carried out to the extent required or permitted by law and that's necessary for your legitimate business purposes.
  • The information you get from monitoring must be used for its intended purpose, unless it leads you to discover an activity that you could not be reasonably expected to ignore, such as criminal acts or health and safety risks to the public or to other staff.
  • Monitoring use of personal email or social media accounts at work must only be done in exceptional circumstances, e.g. if you reasonably believe that there is a real risk of damage to your business or a serious breach of your policies.
  • Only a limited number of authorised staff should have access to the information obtained from monitoring.

More information is available from the Information Commissioner Office and the Scottish Information Commissioner.

What is the law guide

The Desktop Lawyer law guide aims to present the law to you in a comprehensive yet jargon-free and easy-to-read format. Our law guide is constantly kept up to date with changes in business and family law by our team of in house solicitors, and includes information across all the legal jurisdictions in the UK.

Our law guide is free to use. Where we provide documents related to this area of law, or where they may help you with any legal issue in this area, they will be listed to the right of this message.

Explore law guide

Our use of cookies

We use necessary cookies to make our site work. We would also like to set some optional cookies. We won't set these optional cookies unless you enable them. Please choose whether this site may use optional cookies by selecting 'On' or 'Off' for each category below. Using this tool will set a cookie on your device to remember your preferences.

For more detailed information about the cookies we use, see our Cookie notice.

Necessary cookies

Necessary cookies enable core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility. You may disable these by changing your browser settings, but this may affect how the website functions.

Functionality cookies

We'd like to set cookies to provide you with a better customer experience. For more information on these cookies, please see our cookie notice.