This is not me or my situation but it has happened to someone I know, and we have differing opinions on it.
A person, out of love, generosity, concern, stupidity, or for whatever reason buys their GF/BF a cell phone and pays the bill.
Does that person have a right to check said phone bill? If they see a certain number being called over and over at all hours do they have a right to question who the person is talking to and if cheating is suspected to they have a right to confirm it?
This happened to someone I know who was cheating on the bf who bought and was paying for her phone.
She says when he gave her to phone it became her phone and he had no right to invade her privacy. She is mad at him for spying on her and catching her cheating.
I say the phone belongs to the person who is paying for it and if they are paying the bill they certainly have the right to look at it. They also have the right to do whatever they want with the phone, including taking it back, turning it off, or giving it to somebody else. I also said why in the world would anybody think it’s okay to use the phone that someone else is paying for to hook up with the person they are cheating with.
What if though the person who received the phone pays their portion of the bill? Do they then have a right to privacy concerning who they talk to?
I think it’s stupid to expect privacy in that whoever holds the bill sees the bill, but I’m not the kind of person who would care anyway because I don’t do things I need to hide.
What if it’s a parent paying a child’s bill? Or an adult child’s bill?
I have and pay for my own phone so for me it is a moot point.
I don’t look at my sons portion of the bill except the one time he went over on the data plan :eek:
I do not think that paying the bill means you automatically have all rights over the phone. If that’s what you want it to mean, I’d make sure you and the phone user are on the same page. If the phone user is your child, your rights are broader. If they are a SO or some other relationship, then I would negotiate what rights you have until you both are comfortable. If the user was doing something illegal, then that is a game changer and you can certainly shut it off, etc.
Using the phone your BF is paying for to arrange hookups is, of course, an awful thing to do.
If someone is paying any sort of bill, it seems perfectly reasonable and customary to glance over the thing before just blindly handing over whatever amount is written at the bottom. That’s not an invasion of privacy.
The person who pays the bill gets an itemized list of all the calls made, right? Or is that no longer done? Of course the bill payer should look at that list, that’s the point of the phone company sending it.
We pay for our adult children’s phones as part of a package. If one of them suggested that we should not look at their calls we would all have a wonderful laugh before I suggested that they can solve that problem any time they want.
Honestly, what if the phone had been cloned or something and was getting all sorts of inappropriate charges? Of course the bill-payer will be checking out the bill.
The payer has the right to look at the numbers on their bill, absolutely. The person not paying has made their call history the business of the payer by making a call on the line the payer pays for.
If the other person wants privacy, they should have their own private bill that they are accountable for.
I’m pretty sure TracFone has the cheating slut market cornered. Ten dollar phone…a dime a minute for hookups… nothing showing up on the primary cell phone bill.
The service is HIS, as he’s paying for it, monthy, recurring.
She could have ported ‘her phone’ to a new service, or even her own account on that carrier, and paid for it. She chose not to…
They say there are no accidents. She wanted him to know she was ‘cheating’ on him (which is technically as messy as the question of privacy since they’re not married).
He has a right to set up whatever stipulations he wants on the usage of the phone since he’s paying for it. She has the right to either accept or not accept these conditions.
If she didn’t like what he was doing then all she had to do was say “Here’s your phone back.”
Thirded. This doesn’t really have anything to do with privacy, as that’s just a handful of sand she threw up as a flimsy excuse on her way out.
That being said, the privacy in cases like these is just as private as is negotiated. If the phone comes with strings attached, “I get to look whenever I want” then that’s what it comes under. In the absence of negotiation I would assume anything given to me is a gift and I get full rights over what’s done with it and expect privacy about what I do with it, as a person would with any gift.
If the buyer gave the person a phone, it’s their phone and the buyer has no right to look in it and snoop. But if the buyer gets the bill, then it’s their bill and of course they have the right to look at it.
It’s comical that she’s expressed anything other than embarrassment at being so bad at keeping a secret that her cheating was revealed to her boyfriend by an automated system. Reading about someone in the newspaper is closer to spying than opening and flipping through a bill addressed to oneself.