Mark, Rebecca's long time boyfriend, took her phone one night while she was sleeping and went through her contacts, text messages, and her Facebook messages. They were in the process of breaking up, but before they did he went into her Yahoo app and changed her email password. Once he had access to her email account, he changed her security questions. Later, he reset her Facebook password using the associated email account. He was obsessed with the idea that she was cheating on him, though he didn't find any evidence to support it in her phone.She was left locked out of her own accounts for a week, unable to do anything about it. Finally, she tried to make peace with her crazy ex-boyfriend and convinced him to give her the new passwords and she quickly reset them. Most of us don't have partners who would go to such insane, stalker-ish lengths, but the story is instructive in that it reveals how much of our private lives and ourselves we carry around on our phones.Hacking into partners' phones becomes more tempting as the amount of information they contain skyrockets. If you looked in someone's phone ten years ago, you could dig up some dirt, of course. Who were they calling? Then, as text messaging exploded in popularity, you could read through their messages; in place of the vague suspicion that they were talking to someone they "shouldn't" talk to, now you had the actual contents of their conversations. Today, looking through someone's phone has more "pay-off" than ever. You can see whom they've called, read what they've said in text messages, go through their emails, and (the holy grail of suspicious partners) look through their Facebook. With all this information sitting seductively in one location, it's not hard to see why so many partners snoop.I'll even admit that I've done it. Once, years ago, I suspected my boyfriend (who lived part-time in Atlanta, where I lived at the time, and part-time in Los Angeles) wasn't spending his time in LA as innocently as he claimed. So I asked him if he was cheating multiple times. He assured me he wasn't. This reassured me for some time, but I just couldn't ignore the mounting evidence. In the face of his denial, I did something I'm not proud of. I looked at his text messages one morning while he was sleeping and there it was, in black and white (this was pre-iPhone). It was a truly terrible moment, sitting there on his couch. I was disgusted by his behavior and disgusted by my own. It wasn't just an objective fact I had learned: that my boyfriend was cheating on me. I now knew how much he had wanted to kiss her last night. I left.Infidelity was once discovered by lipstick on a collar or a woman's hidden love letters. It's not that cheating has fundamentally changed, but that the ease of communicating, in general, has increased. Unless someone is especially diligent, infidelity necessarily leaves a digital paper trail, usually encased neatly in a smart phone. Most people I spoke with told me they've looked at some partner's phone at some point in the past.Robert noticed his girlfriend texting her boss. At first he assumed their communications were work-related, but, along with their increased frequency, he also noticed an alarming trend. She seemed to become emotionally provoked – elated then upset – by the contents of her boss' messages. He asked her flat out if they were sleeping together. Twice. She roundly denied it, but he couldn't shake the feeling that there was something amiss. So, one night while she was sleeping, he opened her phone and scrolled through the messages.What he found was, not only was she sleeping with her boss, she had given herself a "graduation present" and had slept with a younger guy. Robert recalls that the messages revealed the tawdry minutiae of infidelity; the plans for where to meet, how to disguise their meetings, even a detailed description of the younger man's abs. Mining for information didn't just inform Robert that his partner was cheating. It told him how and where and when. It illuminated the exact lies he had been told to throw him off the scent. Though, of course, he could have stopped reading after finding his suspicions confirmed, he kept going, and he doesn't regret it.If anything, he told me, the plentiful details provided a unique sort of closure. He didn't have to wonder what the other guy had that he didn't (abs, apparently). He didn't have to wonder how far things had gone or what her emotional response was; it was all there laid of for him. While many, myself included, would rather spare themselves the gritty details, Robert left that relationship and didn't look back. He says he would do it again, while simultaneously asserting it was a childish impulse.Something about the power of secret emails and text messages held his interest, however. Maybe it was the ease of discovering someone's most personal interactions, all neatly packaged together in their phone, but he felt the impulse to continue poking around for secrets, even secrets that had little to do with him. He admits he looked through a couple of his friends' phones after the incident with his girlfriend, though he can't say exactly why.There's something enticing about the knowledge that we all carry with us a little blinking, beeping gadget that contains so many of our intimacies. Take a look inside and it's all there; our flirtations and the realizations of our flirtations, embedded within a slew of work emails. The problem, of course, is always the relationship. I've never hacked into anyone else's phone again because I've never dated someone as shifty as that guy again. Now I trust the people I spend time with. But I understand the impulse to peek, and with everyone's phones vibrating and beeping and conveying a nonstop wave of communication, I'm not surprised that people that many people find the temptation too much to withstand.Follow Kelly Bourdet on Twitter: @kellybourdet.
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This is just a news report, but YouTube is filled with ads for cell phone spyware. Ew.
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