I am accountant by profession. I joined a company which does US accounting. It is a small start up. I was from indian accounting background so was thrilled with the revenue that I shared in a random chat to my boyfriend that the company must earn 1.5-1 L only from one client. I never saw our P&L books though.
Later, me and my teammates and infact most of the employees were underpaid and overburdened with the work that we want to leave the company. Then we got idea that why don't we start a small set up of US book keeping if it get flourished then we do not need to work. We steal a vendor email id of our clients so that we can do email marketing to them. We do not targeted the actual clients but their vendor. I kept my Whatsapp chat opened in my office desktop because our clients for easy communication were connected by our Whatsapp and me and my teammates had a conversation in jokingly that we will leak data tonight.
Then my own company without my knowledge breached my Whatsapp data. Which had very private chats and pictures with my boyfriend and all this conversations with my friends.
They threatened us for data breaching and forcefully made us write apology letter.
They threaten us that they have our Whatsapp screenshot as evidence and they can take legal actions against me and my friends.
I am very disturbed mostly because they read some very private and sensitive conversations of mine which they should not read. Is there any way I can take legal actions against them.
Please advise they do not terminated me as they do not have my substitute but I feel really disgusting and disturbed that this happened.
In response to your query,
It is prohibited in many countries for someone to take a screen shot of your text(s) and send it to other people. It's prohibited in the United States, Canada, most of Europe, and a slew of other Asian, African, and Latin American countries. It is a violation of data privacy laws.
Laws governing information privacy include a wide range of topics, including:
Subject information cannot be shared with other organisations or individuals unless specifically authorised by law or by the individual's agreement, which implies that if you collect information about an individual, you cannot distribute that information without their express permission.
In India according to the 2019 Data Protection Act, if any of your company threatens to harm your reputation by sharing any of those private messages or pictures you can sue them for breach of privacy, I would suggest you to serve them with a formal legal notice regarding the same through a suitable lawyer.
Regards,
Aryan Raj
