Have you ever gone into your SOs phone logs, text messages, or emails without his or her permission with the intent on catching him or her red-handed in something illicit, or at least unsavoury?
Be honest now.
I’m beginning to think my ex has my Facebook password now after some comments she recently made. Or perhaps she has recently gone into my phone messages. And this is after snooping my Gmail account for months. Maybe she still has been actually.
It’s all water under the bridge at this point but, why? I don’t get it. That’s some major invasion of privacy.
I can’t say whether I would or wouldn’t, as it never came up. It’s been a while, and, back then, these things weren’t as important, and people still regularly deleted emails/texts/whatever.
I’d like to say I wouldn’t, but I’ve learned the hard way never to assume you won’t give into temptation.
Nope, I’ve been tempted to, but I feel so guilty just for the thought that I know I couldn’t deal with myself if I actually did it.
I “woke up” my husband’s phone once when I thought he had an incoming call, and a text message from his ex-wife was on the screen. I told him I’d read it (I don’t have the knack of seeing text and not reading it automatically) and apologized, and he assured me that he doesn’t consider his text messages private from me and he has nothing to hide, and if I want to read anything in his phone or email or whatever I was welcome to.
Doesn’t matter. I feel the same way about my stuff (that is, he’s welcome to read it,) but it doesn’t make me feel any less guilty about reading his, even accidentally.
Nope, never. I don’t know his passwords, and he doesn’t know mine. Even if we did, though, I know I wouldn’t snoop and I’m certain he wouldn’t either. The closest is that sometimes I “stalk” him on Find My Friends, but he doesn’t mind that at all and he had to enable it to allow me to (I mostly like to keep track of him when he’s riding somewhere on his motorcycle). He can do the same with me and I don’t mind either.
An SO once stole my car and was eventually arrested and my car was returned to me with his cell phone in it (among other thing, which I sold on CL). I used that to access his MySpace (long time ago!), texts, and email. But he kind of volunteered for that to happen.
Yep, I have. He was acting shady. Surprise, he was cheating on me.
I don’t typically snoop but I didn’t feel bad about looking for confirmation at all. Now, if I had snooped and found nothing? I think the relationship was already over at that point so maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, I don’t know. I was certain I would find something though, that’s why I did it.
I don’t snoop now because I don’t feel like I have a reason to. If a relationship ever got to that point (and it was pretty obvious and, of course, he lied when I asked before I’d snooped) I’d probably do it again. People who cheat can’t be trusted to tell the truth about it, you know? They’re already liars. I’d have to have similarly compelling evidence to support my decision to snoop though, like last time.
I don’t know if you can count what I did as “snooping” but I’ll tell you the story and you can judge for yourself.
I had been dating a guy for about 4 months when a person I knew (kind of a friend but not that close), messaged me online one day and told me that my boyfriend had propositioned him for sex the other night, and that I would probably want to know he was trying to cheat on me.
I laughed and thought he must be mistaken, but he swore it was true. I had had no suspicious of infidelity up to that point. So, I started to freak out. Then, when I had the chance, I opened up his laptop and checked his yahoo messenger and facebook chatlogs for any evidence. Sure enough, there was tons, from pretty much our entire history of dating.
I was furious and incredibly hurt. Did I do something wrong, “invading” his privacy by reading his histories? Maybe. But it’s not something I ever would have done unless someone I trusted gave me good reason to do it. My next boyfriend and I dated for almost 2 years and I never once snooped on his phone, emails, whatevers, because I trusted him.
I think if someone is snooping on you all the time it indicates an extreme lack of trust.
And if I had any suspicions that someone was snooping my accounts I would change all the passwords and all of the alternate security questions. It’s these back door questions that are supposed to help verify your identity if you forget a password. They are common and easy exploits by people you know.
So change the answers to things that don’t seem to be responsive to the question. Makes it much harder for someone to guess or search for the answer in your Facebook or other social media pages.
(e.g. Q. What is the name of the city where your mother was born? A. pumpernickel bread)
I answered “other”. We know each other’s passwords and have blanket permission to “snoop” (to use your word). I wouldn’t want it any other way. Our kids are planning for our 50th anniversary next year.
I answered “no,” but it’s pretty similar. I have never looked at his records. He’d probably be justifiably annoyed if I did so for no reason, but if I needed to look for information in an email or something I could. I assume he’s never looked at mine, but I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter to me. We respect each other’s privacy without having the expectation of inviolable privacy.
Not with the intent you mentioned, because I’ve never been cheated on to my knowledge. So, while I can technically say “no” to the poll, I have snooped before. Just once. Years ago, I memorized an ex’s email password so I could spy on his email afterward. I felt wronged and wanted revenge for being dumped. It was my first time being dumped, and I was young, impulsive, and really pissed-off. He was in the same room and I had permission to use the computer. He was sitting on the couch watching tv and not me, so I peeked at the saved password in firefox and memorized it. The next day, I logged into his email account and read a couple, then felt so guilty that I stopped and dedicating myself to unremembering the password (which worked, I don’t even remember his username now).
It was very, very wrong of me, I’m not proud of it, and would never do it again. In retrospect, I was mentally and financially unstable at the time. So he was definitely justified in breaking things off with me. I’m really glad he never found out, because I’d have felt like SUCH a shitbag.
Ever since, I always set a master password in firefox. I strongly recommend *everyone *do the same. Also, never *ever *break up with somebody and let them have unsupervised access to your computer 15 minutes later. That doesn’t make it your fault if they snoop on you, but it significantly increases your chances of getting snooped on.
At the beginning of our relationship when I wasn’t very secure I did occasionally check my partner’s emails and Facebook pages.( I knew his passwords) What happened was I occasionally misunderstood things and gave myself a lot of unnecessary grief. Now I neither snoop nor care to, because a) I trust him b) I don’t like myself when I “snoop”, and c) we have too much history for much other than illegal activities to change my opinion of him. If he wanted out he would tell me, and vice versa.
My wife leaves her laptop on and sitting on the coffee table all the time. So I am a little tempted to have a peek sometimes. But then, if she had something to hide, she wouldn’t leave her laptop where I could look and looking would be so wrong. Maybe she is testing me, maybe she just trusts me or maybe she doesn’t care because she has nothing to hide. Maybe all three.
Or maybe she is having a torrid affair and is hoping I’ll find out so she can divorce me and blame it on me because I check her emails! If that is the case, I just won’t give her the satisfaction.
No, I have never snooped and have no desire to. I would be **very **unhappy if my husband snooped on me. I value my privacy very much. Snooping on my husband is also out of the question because he has confidential data on his computer with regard to his clients. He is very protective of his information for that reason and I don’t want to violate that.
I have never snooped, and I never will. Really, there’s very little in my own life I really feel any need to keep to myself, it’s all about trust and having grace around spaces that are generally personal to most people. There’s nothing in my email or on my facebook or texts that is mine that I am compelled to hide from a girlfriend, but when I’ve been snooped on, I definitely felt violated, precisely because it showed a lack of trust. I don’t really need the privacy, but it’s nice to know that if for some reason I did, I’d have it.
That all said, one common thing in relationships that I’ve seen that I do strongly disagree with is the whole idea of no secrets. In that regard, essentially anything that is mine is free for an established girlfriend to know. However, secrets that aren’t mine, those of my friends and family, aren’t necessarily mine to share freely. It’s something that’s extremely important to me, for my friends to know that if they need to confide in me, I won’t violate that trust, it doesn’t matter if it’s also to someone else that I trust at that level; I don’t get to make that choice. For me, it’s not unlike having a security clearance or being a lawyer or a psychologist or a doctor or a priest and not sharing that stuff with your spouse. Those secrets belong to the government or client or patient or parishioner. Besides, if it’s not my secret or her secret and it doesn’t impact her, other than idle curiousity, what would she gain from knowing?
So that’s my other issue related to snooping, besides the lack of trust in the SO, it’s potentially a violation of trust for whoever else may have trusted that person. In a particular situation where I was snooped on, she did come across stuff that wasn’t my place to share and it felt like a betrayal on my part to that friend.
As you go on to say that if you hadn’t found anythign it was probably over, but this is exactly it. If you feel the need to snoop, there’s a real problem with the relationship even if you don’t find nothing. Sometimes the trust issue is reparable, sometimes its not, but snooping isn’t going to help.
I said “other”, because we’re more likely to shout: “Well if you want to know what time we were supposed to be there look it up in my email!” - [^%&^!@£P] - “No you look it up!”- [!@£(*&£%] - “UUUGGH fine, why do I always have to do everything. Wouldn’t kill you to just help by checking my email for me!”
Or sometimes just the lazy “mmmm my phone buzzed… can you look for me…pleeease?.. oow, but I can’t reach and you can almost touch it with your foot!”
I’ve never snooped to find out about anything though. I’d just ask.