Abstract
The continual emergence of new technologies impacts every aspect of society including the way people work. Most of the modern-day labour is carried out in a digital environment allowing employers to exercise their supervisory authority through the use of potentially intrusive monitoring methods. As a result, it is critical to set a balance between the employer’s legitimate interests to ensure efficiency, productivity, and security at the workplace and the employees’ right to privacy. On September 5th, 2017 the European Court of Human Rights issued a landmark ruling. In Bărbulescu v. Romania the Grand Chamber of the ECtHR found that the Romanian judicial system failed to protect Mr. Bărbulescu’s right of a private life by not achieving a “fair balance” between a private company’s right to monitor its employees’ electronic communications, and the right to respect of private life and correspondence stipulated in Article 8 of the European Charter of Human Rights. Moreover, the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation – a legal instrument expected to reshape the future of data protection adds several new implications to the topic of employee privacy. In the light of these developments, the current work aims to defend that the right to a private life at the workplace is shaped by human rights and data protection regimes, which exist in symbiosis safeguarding workplace privacy through personal data protection.