I agree with what most people are saying about spying in general… but I don’t think simple public googling to verify what seems like an outrageous tale counts as spying at all. If I meet someone who says they won the national spelling bee one year and also was in the special forces and also trained as an astronaut (or something), I’ll be 99% sure they’re lying, but there’s always a chance, and it’s very easy to google things like former spelling bee winners, so I will. Then I’ll know, and I don’t see what I’d have to feel guilty about at all.
Anything involving a close friend or SO is, of course, a different kettle of fish entirely.
I googled a guy I work with recently, and I don’t feel a bit of shame about it. Here’s what happened:
Hadn’t seen “Bob” in a week or so so I asked what he was up to. I was told “oh Bob may not be working here for a while” (we are sort of freelance-on call employees) but no one would say why. I gathered that he had been arrested, but the couple of people who appeared to know why wouldn’t say. I googled him and found that he had been arrested on half a dozen felonies, including attempted sexual assault of a minor.
Now, his trial hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t know all the facts of his case, but personally I want to know if the people I work with are violent felons, since I spend 8-16 hours a day, seven days a week, around them.
If you feel that you are better off without knowing that kind of thing, then fine, no one is forcing you to know that. Myself, I want to know that kind of thing.
Mind you, if his trial ends in acquittal, I’ll have the trial record and later his personal account of what went down, and I’ll accept that and factor it into my behaviour around him. Of course, if he’s convicted, Bob won’t be back at work for at least 5 years, if ever, so dealing with him won’t be something that I’ll have to do.
Thinking you can or should or have the right to stop your SO from joking about you with his friends or complaining about you is already going too far, so anything you do yo try yo enforce that is automatically over the line.
First of all, the better or worse thing is irrelevant. They’re both wrong.
Second, “uncovering the truth” is not dome unambiguous virtue, unless you’re in law enforcement or an investigative journalist. You don’t have the moral right yo do whatever it takes when you’re uncovering the truth merely in the context of s petty personal disagreement or relationship problems.
No.
It’s not about whether you have the right to stop his behavior, it’s about whether you have the right to know if your SO is being honest.
It’s a 20 year relationship where you trusted your spouse for that long. A friend of his calls and tells you things about your relationship that your SO promised not to tell anyone. You confront your SO, he says he won’t do it again. Same thing happens another time. Again you confront SO and he says he won’t do it again. Now you don’t trust him because he lied that other time.
At this point, are your only two options to leave the relationship or to stay and risk your SO humiliating you even further? You can’t verify if he’s being honest or not?
You don’t have that unequivocal right to know for sure by any means.
No, you can’t. Either you forget the idea that this kind of secrecy is important to you or you end the relationship. There is nothing healthy or salvageable here.
As an isolated thing, I don’t think that’s so wrong, especially if you have a weird feeling about this person you just met.
I think that’s okay because the relationship would be in the early stages of building trust, the snooping is not intrusive nor an extraordinary amount of effort, the results may have a substantial bearing on one’s own well-being.
However, in other cases proposed earlier, I find several problems. First, in the case of co-workers, it really doesn’t matter that much whether your office mate is an exaggerating blowhard. Either they do their work well or they don’t, and one need not have a huge degree of trust in a coworker’s personal character or personal life to do your job. If someone thinks that trust in one’s coworker is a big deal that necessitates snooping, the real problem is that such person has boundary and/or trust issues.
The other problem comes in when snooping is a way to avoid real intimacy and communication. If someone is having problems with their SO, there is nothing that will be found on a computer that will solve that problem. The way to resolve issues with an SO is through building the relationship or, in worst cases, moving on.
Just think about it: if one finds nothing bad on an SO’s computer, does that fix the issues of trust in the relationship? I believe that if someone is going to invade a person’s privacy in that way, the relationship is probably pretty broken, and suspicions will continue regardless of what evidence there is. There’s just no practical utility in snooping in that instance.
And finally, there’s the golden rule. How much privacy do you think you’re entitled to? Would you like it if you were the subject of those kinds of snooping? It wouldn’t bother me at all if someone googled me to see if I really work where I say I do. But if they start looking up where I live, who my classmates are, planting recording devices, and so on, I will feel wronged. So if the OP truly doesn’t understand why some of those scenarios cross the line, she should just ask herself if she’s ok with those things being done to her.
It sounds like you’re saying that if you want to know if someone is being honest or not, then you have trust issues. I guess I don’t understand what’s so bad about wanting to know if you’re dealing with an honest person if you know you might have to rely on this person in the future.
Do you think this will be the case for everyone? That there is no one that could listen to a recording of their SO for a day and then be satisfied that their SO is telling the truth?
And out of curiosity, what do you mean by “building the relationship”? I’d like to have your take on what a couple could do to rebuild trust.
I don’t see anything wrong if someone wants to verify information about me that they can search for in public sources.
I’d have a problem if the spying were more invasive. If it were such that I’d have to be concerned about my actions because of the spying. Like if coworkers were looking through my medical records, then I would have to worry about what I should say to the doctor.
I also don’t have a problem with someone verifying if I’m lying or not at least once or twice. If I volunteer information that someone else has to rely on, then I don’t mind them fact checking. I know I’m putting them in a vulnerable position because they are relying on me and know little about my veracity. If they continued to fact check everything I said, then at some point it would become too annoying.
Finally, I’m still up in the air about spying in a relationship. Somehow I feel that if someone distrusted me, then they should be allowed to do some fact checking on their own if it could make them trust me again. I’m currently mulling over whether there is any type of situation where spying or verifying information would actually make someone trust their SO again.
The question is whether it matters or not. If you coworker says he spend the weekend at Special Forces training camp where he won several medals, why should it matter to you if he was actually playing Xbox all weekend? If he coworker says he is going to finish a report on Tuesday and he doesn’t, that’s not an issue of trust. That’s an issue of performance. With some exceptions, like if you work in a bank or at the CIA, the odds are that if someone is compelled to raise issues of trust with their coworkers, there’s something wrong with that relationship, because it is starting to blur the lines of what one should expect in a personal relationship - which is forms of intimacy and compatibility - with what should be expected in a business relationship - which is performance and civility.
I think the vast majority of people who would violate boundaries in that way have a more fundamental problem which will cause stress in the future, regardless of what is on the audio tapes. If the audio tapes are exculpatory, I think the odds are high that the next question will be, “But what’s on his computer? And who does he go to lunch with? And why has he changed his haircut?” Etc.
On the most simple level, treating each other like real people and using communication to solve problems. On the more practical level, where one is bound by children or finances where there are good reasons to work out rather serious intimacy and trust issues, probably professional counseling.
I find it extremely odd that you link fact checking with truthfulness in this example. The basic act of fact checking isn’t about assessing someone’s character, it is an objective assessment of a person’s work. If a supervisor of mine obsessively engaged in fact checking of my work, I would want to know why the supervisor had suspicions about my work product; as opposed to taking that as a commentary on my personal integrity. This example you use is what gives me (and others) suspicions about questionable boundaries. Work should be about the work, not judgments of your (or your coworkers’) personal integrity. Making routine things have larger significance about the quality of a person is a divisive and destructive impulse.
MYOB
I moved your posts around so that I could answer these two paragraphs together.
How is personal integrity not a factor in your work? I guess you listed the CIA and banking as exceptions, so there might be others. I can agree that in some jobs it’s better to verify the work and not the person, if that’s possible. However, in some professions, work isn’t so easy to evaluate (e.g. business, law, politics) and personal integrity should be taken into account.
You’re right about this. There are much better ways to solve trust issues in a relationship rather than resorting to espionage.
Please give an example for your line of work where you feel you need to place trust in a person. Not just that you depend on someone to get something done correctly, but where you have a need to question someone’s veracity.
Fundamentally, even if you think your creepy behavior is justified, you are still a creep. (For any value of “you.”)
This sentence says it all. Hopefully it will be mended over time and in steps the way a couch to 5K thread might get someone (or a couple) slowly ready for race day.
I’ve been called a creep and a really nice guy all in the same breath; ftr it still hurt.
But if I can look deeper and try to see why, try to see that perspective which is negative in myself, and try to fix it, then I know that I’m trying to fix the problem. Labels don’t fix problems, they classify them so we don’t have to think as much.
I think solutions tend to come from being thoughtful instead.
I can’t really think of anything where focusing on integrity works better than focusing on job performance.
I think I’m coming to the conclusion that spying might work in some rare circumstances, but in most situations there are better options.
FWIW, the situation that led to this thread was a statement by one of my coworkers that she has been “with our company for 15 years.” When I asked her in what capacity, she wouldn’t tell me. I asked around and no one knew her. So I did a google search and eventually figured out what she meant.
The lie touches on her qualifications, so it’s somewhat related to her job performance, but it really does not affect her day to day work. I guess she threw up a huge red flag that she was hiding something, and I couldn’t leave it alone.
ETA: Thank you, Count Blucher.
Sounds like she was full of shit anyway if she had to resort to that kind of statement. My opinion of her would probably have plummeted regardless of the truth or details of her statement.
I’m not exactly sure what you’re moralizing about, but it looks like you might be scolding me for calling someone a creep. The whole point of my comment of the “value of you” was that this is not directed at an particular person. So far as I know, this entire discussion is hypothetical.
The point I am making is that the behaviors described by the OP are creepy and that … as I said … that doesn’t change just because someone thinks that he or she has justification.
There is no “but … he did this … and I just want to …” justification for snooping around on someone as described. That’s the point.
:rolleyes: Oh for… you can assume a generalized you, as is typical of conversations like this on the Dope, rather than a specific you. I’m not sure why I have to spell this out, but if you’re not engaging in problematic, unethical behavior, then obviously I’m not condemning you, specifically, but rather condemning those who actually DO engage in unethical behavior.
You can also cut me some slack for not reading your mind, since you never said you were speaking rhetorically, and you keep coming up with more and more, weaker and weaker excuses why such behavior should be justifiable. If you don’t tell me you don’t actually think it’s justifiable, I can’t actually know you feel that way.
–Kaio, not psychic since 1991.
If it seemed like I was scolding then I need to work on my communication skills. I’m sorry. That word stings though, but it has nothing to do with you or anything you wrote.
Something else for me to work on…
You either trust the other person, or you don’t! Spying on them, on any pretext, in any fashion is never, ever going to restore trust.
When you have reached a point, in any relationship, where you feel justified in prying into someone else’s affairs, your relationship is already fractured, and your actions are only going to make it worse. This seems self evident to me.
If someone is bragging on some bullshit, take it with a grain of salt or flat out refuse to believe it. Then leave it alone. The truth always outs. Always.
If someone may be deceiving you, either call them on it, or let it go and wait and see. If you doubt your partner’s fidelity, prying is only going to reassure you, until the next time. When you have lost trust you need to own it and either get right with it or leave it behind and breakup. Sooner rather than later. Just an opinion.