Invasion of privacy | Employer justifies reading worker's personal emails because he'd used a work laptop

A mining industry worker has sued their former employer for reading through his personal emails and iCloud account, after being dismissed for allegedly working on personal projects and contacting competitor brands.

Shayano Madzikanda, a former IT employee at the mining sector company Mecrus, was suspended and told to return his work laptop. He then learnt that the reason for his dismissal was because of accusations that he was working on personal projects and contacting rival companies on the device.

However, Madzikanda claims that the only way his ex-employer would have known this was if they accessed his personal emails, which they would have only retrieved from snooping through his work laptop, which had his personal account passwords saved onto it.

Madzikanda filed a complaint to the information commissioner in Australia, where the company is based, in 2019. However, this month, a federal court rejected carrying out an investigation into whether his employer did look through his accounts.