The most surprising thing to emerge from the European court’s judgment that employers have a right to look at an employee’s email is that this right is not absolute. There is a presumption of privacy even for employees in the workplace. That is not absolute, either, and in the case of Bogdan Bărbulescu, the Romanian software engineer who fought the case against his employers as far as it would go, his right to privacy did not extend to concealing from them the fact that he was using company resources for private ends.

The detail matters here. He was accused of using the company’s messaging account, set up to liaise with customers, for private conversations. He denied this. The company doubted his denial, examined the account, and found he had indeed been using it for purposes that it had explicitly forbidden. In a rather extravagant humiliation, his employers printed out a week’s worth of his private chats – 46 pages – and circulated them around the office, complete with what the court describes as “details of his sexual health”.

This was undoubtedly a violation of his privacy, but a majority of the court accepted the argument that his employers could not have checked whether he was using their account for private purposes without – if he was doing so – snooping into these private purposes. Whether it was just and proportional to sack him is another matter, not taken up directly.

There may be someone who has never fooled around on work computers for private purposes but it is hard to imagine such an improbable paragon. Both our work lives and our private communications are now almost entirely carried out across digital networks, whether these appear to us as mobile phones or computer screens. If we have souls at all, they are now to be found online and no one wants their soul in the company’s data store.

There are hard technological limits to what can be snooped on: some forms of encryption are in practice impossible even for governments to crack; but the social and legal limits of privacy matter more. A right to privacy is a gesture of respect for another person, and technology knows nothing of respect. It can only answer questions of power: is the thing possible? Not the very different question: ought this thing to be done? Some employers seem to want a degree of control over their employees that verges on the totalitarian. Even in the service industries, people are expected not merely to carry out their duties according to entirely robotic scripts, but also to step through their drills with the approved cheerful and positive attitude. Where more onerous jobs are concerned, especially those with duties that spill out beyond “office hours”, the employee can end up with almost no time or thoughts that they can call their own.

It is important to fight back against such dehumanising attitudes, and the popular outrage that greeted early and inaccurate reports of the court’s decision is a healthy sign. Almost everyone can imagine themselves as the victims of bullying or power-hungry employers. This indignation, and particularly the spirited front-page treatment that the Sun and the Daily Mail gave to the ruling, made for a striking contrast with the apathy with which most of Fleet Street greeted Edward Snowden’s revelations.

Yet the powers that governments have arrogated to themselves exceed those claimed by even the greediest employer. And indeed, for the great bulk of us, there is at least the theoretical potential for the tech giants, whom we entrust with all our data and private communications, to pry on us more intrusively than our frequently technologically clueless employers. It is easier to envisage the firms and the managers poking around in our electronic affairs: the motive and the sort of things they might discover are plain. But if we were able to grasp the panopticon that more remote corporations have us locked up in, we would be even more afraid. The likes of Google conform to various self-denying ordinances, which extend to wiping data after a time. Even so, the exhaustive knowledge of every customer’s habits is an almighty asset which firms might be tempted to tap at some future point – and that is if state agencies don’t tap it for them first.

In the case of governments, the threats with which they must deal are very much greater than the problems caused by people slacking off at work, and demand proportionately greater powers. Yet Acton’s law still applies. Greater powers must tend to greater corruption. Why is it that people understand this easily when thinking of their workplace, yet find it so difficult to extend the same healthy suspicion to their governments?