Larry Page of Davis LLP discusses a case in which an employee was fired for cause for snooping/improper accessing of a file:
In a recent decision of the British Columbia Supreme Court, the Court upheld the termination for cause of a help desk analyst in the IT department who had been employed for over 20 years at Coast Capital Savings Credit Union. (Steel v. Coast Capital Savings Credit Union, 2013 BCSC 527)
Employees at Coast were permitted to have a personal folder in which they would keep confidential business documents. Under the privacy policy at Coast, the files in the personal folder could only be read or edited by the employee who had the folder. Help desk employees were allowed to access personal folders but could only do so to resolve a technical problem and only if the employee who had the personal folder first gave permission to the help desk to access the folder.
Read more about the case on Mondaq.
h/t, @PrivacyCDN