The Turkish Constitutional Court, with a decision dated 28 December 2021 and published on Official Gazette on 11 February 2022, stated that that dismissal due to WhatsApp correspondence obtained by the employer violates an employee's right to respect for private life and freedom of communication under Article 20 and 22 of the Constitution.

The Court made a specific assessment regarding how the employer obtains WhatsApp correspondences, the legitimate interest in control, the compulsory reason for accessing the correspondences, the information of the employee, the fact that the correspondences are specific for personal use.

As a rule, an employee can make personal correspondence with the rightful expectation that his fundamental rights and freedoms will be protected in the workplace, unless he received in advance full and clear information regarding the control of the communications made over the company computers allocated for use of the employees.

Moreover, the employer must have legitimate interest to inspect the communications made over the company computers.

Only if these conditions are met, employers have a legitimate interest to inspect corporate e-mails without an employee’s explicit consent before a particular inspection.

Similar decisions were adopted by the Court in 2016, 2020 and early 2021, and this new ruling confirms the general principle described above, clarifying that the employer's obligation to inform its employees about the possible inspection of their correspondence also covers private correspondence via private applications downloaded on company computers.

Considering this, it is very important that employers rush to provide adequate information to employees on the processing of their data and on possible controls on the content of their work tools. This is to avoid the risk that possible investigations, however conducted in the interest of the company, could be considered in violation of the rights of employees, whose privacy is increasingly protected.