Unfair dismissal?

Comms69 wrote: »

It's no more unhelpful than your post citing your interpretation of the law - , which is highly flawed as the information, despite being accessed from a third party server is still downloaded onto the company computer, and where the employee in all likelihood signed the terms of use of company IT equipment, which would allow access.

The employee didn't download the information to the computer though, that is the whole point. The employer downloaded it after the employee had been terminated!

Well I could tell you that I have a degree in computer science and 8 years industry experience, but you would say that counts for nothing I'm sure. Your analogy is based on a complete lack of understanding of what a session is, and case law on the computer misuse act demonstrates that the analogy I have presented is what judges are going to rule by.

I think this discussion has highlighted how poor the general publics knowledge of how computers function is!

I think the key point that I haven't quite gotten across perhaps and which doesn't easily translate to real life is that this situation here revolves around the concept of a virtual link between the two computers which the OP could be thought of as having left behind.

In the scenario in this thread we start out with two computers, the employers computer which the OP is using and the linkedin server which is where all the personal messages are stored.

When the OP sent their login details to the linkedin server a "session" was created between the employers computer and the linkedin server. A session can simply be thought of as a tunnel over which information can be exchanged, thus now allowing the employers computer to download personal data belonging to the OP in the future.

OP is then terminated by employer.

What the employer then did by clicking links on the OP's linkin profile page was to send requests to the linkedin server asking for the OP's private messages, the server sent those messages to the employers computer in response.

So we now have those private messages downloaded onto the employers computer due to an unauthorised request that they made after the employee was dismissed.

If I use a message analogy instead, it's a bit like me sending letters pretending to be someone else in the hopes of receiving personal information about them back.

The employer can look through any data on their computer that they like, but they cannot use that data however they like. Here they used session data to obtain unauthorised access to other data, this is the basis of many types of hacks, we just don't call something like this hacking because it's so unsophisticated and opportunistic in nature.

Just to add a quick comment - it's been suggested upthread that the OP's Linked-In account usage was personal. I think it was both business and personal, the OP worked in recruitment and Linked-In is an appropriate tool to use to advertise vacancies and headhunt potential candidates. However, in using it as a work took, It would have been wiser to separate work from personal by having two logins (business and personal email addresses), or at least not indulging in personal messaging.