A recent ruling by the Italian Court of Cassation has caused considerable confusion among those less attentive to the nuances of an employer’s ability to access the various forms of communication used by employees and to use the contents of such communications to proceed with dismissal or, more simply, to impose appropriate disciplinary measures.
In fact, the Court of Cassation, with ruling no. 32283 of 11 December 2025, simply established that corporate chats — as work tools accessible and viewable by all employees — cannot claim the same level of confidentiality and privacy protection as private correspondence.
This judicial trend had already been expressed by the Court of Cassation, Labour Section, in ruling no. 33809 of 12/11/2021, where the appeal of a former employee claiming a violation of his privacy due to the extraction of evidence of his corporate disloyalty from the computer he used during the employment relationship was rejected.
Despite this, following the ruling, several clients of my Octopus investigative agency in Cassano d’Adda — particularly small businesses lacking employment law consultants and with limited corporate compliance — have asked me to extract the contents of private or group conversations (even with the complicity of one of the participants), believing they could use them freely in legal proceedings. However, the matter is more complex than it appears.
1. What a Company May Do to Monitor and Use Corporate Chats for Its Own Protection
An employer may continuously monitor corporate chats and communications between employees, provided that certain rules are respected and appropriate precautions are taken:
- The chat or any other form of intra-company communication must be established on the company’s initiative and open to all employees involved in managing the tasks for which it was created.
- Through internal circulars and company policy regulations, it must be officially stated that the chats in question serve exclusively organisational and security purposes, advising employees against any private or inappropriate use.
- There must also be a demonstrable effort by the company to train employees on security protocols and precautions aimed at protecting corporate assets and know-how.
- The retention of chats or any other form of employee communication must be minimised to the management needs for which it was created.
- Any additional investigative monitoring of chats must be: • Motivated by strong suspicions of disloyal or unfaithful conduct by the employee; • Limited in time and scope; • Respectful of the privacy and dignity of the monitored employee; • Entrusted to a licensed private investigator authorised for corporate investigations.
- Disciplinary actions or dismissals based on the content of corporate chats must follow immediately upon their discovery by the employer.
- The measures taken must be based on objective responsibilities of the author of the corporate chat and cannot simply represent a de relato account, which at most may trigger an internal corporate investigation or a whistleblowing procedure.
The risk of a dismissal being challenged and penalties imposed is high for employers who fail to comply with the seven basic rules listed above and who are not adequately supported by an employment lawyer in corporate management and crisis handling.
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2. How a Company Can Manage Disloyal Conduct and Communications by Employees
The main irregularities occurring on corporate chats typically involve the following:
- Verbal harassment in the workplace.
- Defamation and insults by the employee against their own company.
- Threats and extortion against the company or colleagues.
- Sharing of racist, homophobic, or discriminatory content.
- Disclosure of trade secrets to third parties or unauthorised employees.
In all cases where there is a victim, the victim has every right to attach the conversations to their criminal complaint against the harasser, defamer, racist, etc. — although defamation requires the presence of third-party witnesses within the chat.
If the employee’s criminally relevant conduct involves — as it often does — the company itself, it is advisable for the company’s management to also take steps to fulfil one of the fundamental duties of an employer: ensuring the best possible working conditions for employees and preventing or mitigating negligent charges arising from corporate liability.
As a preliminary step, the experts at the Octopus investigative agency can make the incriminating chats particularly comprehensible through screenshots, transcriptions and descriptions, calling upon digital forensics specialists as a second step where necessary.
When a company suspects disloyal conduct by an employee, both the company’s management and the private detective they engage must exercise great caution when navigating the concept of epistolary secrecy, which remains fully intact and applies not only to communications between two individuals but also to multiple participants within closed groups (WhatsApp, etc.).
Chats between employees often cannot be used as evidence, but merely as a starting point to initiate corporate investigations by a licensed private investigator.
3. How the Octopus Investigative Agency Can Help Companies Manage Breaches and Abuses on Corporate Chats
It should first be noted that Francesco Finanzon, the owner of the Octopus Investigative Agency, is authorised to conduct defensive criminal investigations — an authorisation that proves invaluable in protecting professional secrecy in all internal corporate investigations where there is a risk of the company being involved due to corporate liability.
The corporate private detective can intervene in various ways and at the different stages at which abuse on the corporate intranet chat occurs:
- Analysing the content of communications and reporting them in a dedicated court-admissible report.
- Conducting an audit, alone or alongside internal company resources, to reconstruct the circumstances in which the critical event took place.
- Carrying out undercover investigative activities, using mystery client or mystery employee procedures, to better understand and substantiate the disloyal, reckless, or inappropriate behaviour of the employee.
- Completing investigations and surveillance of employees suspected of disloyalty or misconduct to better document their sanctionable behaviour, should it continue or occur outside the workplace or working hours.
- Conducting asset and financial investigations, since corporate disloyalty often has an economic motive, making it necessary to “follow the money” in order to prove it adequately.
The growing success of corporate whistleblowing demonstrates how the working environment must be protected by the employer, also with the help of the corporate private investigator.