The employer's penetration of the employee's personal correspondence and the content in the personal or mixed inbox is permitted only when there are very exceptional and exceptional circumstances that justify it, such as a serious concern, or a reasonable basis for criminal activity or other wrongdoings of the employee, and subject to the cumulative conditions required for the matter, including the principles of legitimacy, proportionality, adherence to the goal, transparency and informed and free will."
- First, we note that a review of the counterclaim indicates that the claim is based on the Protection of Privacy and Compensation Law without proof of damage under this law, with respect to 9 offenses that were committed according to the counter-plaintiff in relation to each of them, he claimed compensation of ILS 100,000 and petitioned for compensation in the amount of ILS 900,000 in respect of this component.
- As ruled in the matter of Labor Appeal (National) 41179-01-24 Mark Friedman in Tax Appeal - Revital Elkaner [published in Nevo] (March 26, 2025), claims based on the Protection of Privacy Law are not within the jurisdiction of the Labor Court, and therefore, it is not possible to award relief for violation of privacy under this law. Since the counter-plaintiffs did not raise a claim in the counterclaim that the counter-defendants breached the duty of good faith by their conduct, the result is that the claim should be dismissed on this ground.
- More than necessary, and in light of the many claims regarding the intrusion into the plaintiff's mailbox, we have found to detail a number of points that arise from the evidence material. According to the plaintiff, on July 27, 2021, she received an email from her client, Augusta Victoria Hospital, a large customer of the plaintiff's for protective equipment, which was sent to my father's organizational email, when he was not working for the plaintiff. It was claimed that in this framework, the customer requested the bank details for the purpose of making a financial transfer of a transaction that my father had executed, which was allegedly unknown to the defendant. Scrolling the email revealed to the plaintiff that already on March 11, 2021, Avi was in contact with the customer while instructing him to change the order so that it would be in the name of Iris Marketing. It was further claimed that it turned out that my father had deleted emails from his personal email in the plaintiff, but since he remained in the server's memory, most of the emails were restored (paragraph 48 of the amended statement of claim). The plaintiff also added that my father had a private email linked to Gmail and an email that was for work purposes only, where, according to the plaintiff, my father's bank account details were found.
- According to the defendants, Avi never deleted emails, but rather "filed them in a folder on the plaintiff's server, with the intention that if the plaintiff needed any information from the period of his employment, she would be able to receive or connect it to the server and retrieve as much information as needed... My father did not delete the email box, so the plaintiff did not have to hack into any organizational email, and even took advantage of this email to impersonate my father months after his departure." (Paragraph 77 of the amended statement of defense).
- According to my father, this was his private email and that of other employees such as Amir, since Avi never linked theGmail email to the plaintiff and did not ask to do so. Hence, the plaintiff's intrusion into my father's private organizational email without permission is an invasion of privacy and even a criminal offense while impersonating my father.
- In their summaries, the defendants note that "there is no dispute that all the emails that my father sent, insofar as he sent, regarding various transactions unrelated to the plaintiff, were sent from his email inbox in the plaintiff - avi@atst.co.il and were part of the plaintiff's e-mail system, and as my father testified, all these emails were read in real time by Tsafrir, so there can be no dispute that Tsafrir knew all of my father's actions." (Paragraph 32 of the defendants' summaries).
- Was the plaintiff entitled to review the email correspondence in my father's professional inbox (under the email avi@atst.co.il) and in the Gmail box?
As for the professional box , in his supplementary main interrogation, Avi testified for the first time that Tsafrir knew and approved all of his actions because he saw them "online":