General Relationship DiscussionAlthough anyone can post anywhere on Talk About Marriage, this section is for people interested in general relationship and marriage advice.
View Poll Results: is spying (keyloggers, fake profiles) right or wrong for any reason?
--Not trying to be argumentative. Maybe I just need a second cup of coffee. I think I see the analogy with W.M. Felt from an ethical standpoint, but I believe the legal issues were very different.
It's been asserted more than once on TAM that joint property law trumps privacy law. It's been asserted more than once on TAM that marriage provides a legal right to any and all information where your spouse is concerned.
I understand the importance of transparency in marriage a lot better now, then I did six months ago, but that transparancy is an ethical, not a legal right. When it comes to marriage, the two are not the same at all.
I guess in the end, the reason I keep pointing out that the use of keyloggers is often illegal is to salve my own conscience as an I.T. person.
As an I.T. person you know then that there is no right to privacy when using company computers. In fact you can be dismissed for going to the wrong websites. It is general practice to have software in place to monitor activity.
So too then a couple can have transparency.
Cool, let's add this to the pre-nup then. Now we are all legal.
While we are at it let's add a non disclosure agreement.
Also a two week notice expectation.
The marriage should be contingent on a background check and a random drug screening.
Using marital assets for extramarital affairs is grounds for dismissal.
Finances would then need expense reports to be approved by the other spouse. Are we having fun yet?
Wedding rings to be displayed at all times. Extramrital affairs could be treated like insider trading.
So all of this is very cute and interesting but for many of us marriage is a serious thing. More serious than these types of laws. It is interesting that the adultry laws are now off the books and yet there are these survelince laws. So them per the law it is not wrong to cheat, but is wrong to survey to protect a marriage. Therefore one can not use the law as their moral compass.
__________________
Rectitude--Courage--Benevolence--Respect--Honesty--Honor--Loyalty
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
"Why do we fall? So we might learn to pick ourselves up."
"It’s not who we are underneath, but what we do that defines us."
Last edited by Entropy3000; 05-09-2012 at 11:54 AM.
Octillo, but bosses check up on us as well. they read e-mails, sometimes as they come in and unabashedly comment on them. They engage in gossip with other people in the department to find out how you're doing. In some ways I agree with, a boss needs to be in control of his business /department / whatever.
Yes. Employers have a legal right to monitor the electronic communications of their employees on company owned equipment, provided certain conditions are met. The most important of these is prior disclosure at the time of hire.
When we're talking about surveillance software seruptiously installed on an unsuspecting person's machine we're talking about something else entirely. (And the lack of prior disclosure is arguably the whole point in doing it.)
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Originally Posted by NextTimeAround
But then we can say the same about personal relationships. I don't see too many people balking over a parent's need to know who their child is interacting with. The opinion is divided between the married partners......but I think after reading a few my posts, my opinon about it is pretty clear.
Minors do not have the full range of legal rights that adults do. You do under most circumstances, have a right to monitor the communications of your minor child. This changes when they reach the age of majority and become competent in the eyes of the law though.
A third legal use of surveillance software is in correctional facilities. Were it not for these three legitimate uses, the publishers probably would have gone out of business years ago.*
The publishers of this genre of software that actually reside on U.S. soil further protect themselves by clearly warning you beforehand that you do not have a legal right to use it on your spouse:
*Do you remember a piece of software called, 'MyNorris'? The software would alert you by text or email when a known porn site was accessed from the target computer. The company made a huge mistake however by specifically advertising it as a tool for wives to keep tabs on their husbands and the company vanished pretty quickly in a sea of litigation.
So all of this is very cute and interesting but for many of us marriage is a serious thing. More serious than these types of laws. It is interesting that the adultry laws are now off the books and yet there are these survelince laws. So them per the law it is not wrong to cheat, but is wrong to survey to protect a marriage. Therefore one can not use the law as their moral compass.
I sense your frustration here and I'm sorry. Like I said, in the end everyone has to assess the risks versus benefits of their decisions for themselves.
The only reason I've pointed out the legal aspect of the equation is to counter the notion that there are no risks.
When things get ugly and one spouse suspects the other of spying, their attorney may come to someone like me to document the existence of this software. If it exists, we'll tell them what it is and when it was installed. Their attorney will contact the publisher and they'll fall all over themselves to provide purchase information. This is another way the publishers protect themselves and they disclose the fact that they intend to fully cooperate with legal inquiries up front.
I don't personally understand why anyone would want to hand a cheating spouse a potential weapon like this, but then I've never been in that position and can only guess what it must be like.
Indeed consider this though, my wife is having an EA. When I discovered this by helping to fix her computer, she never told me about the EA. Over the past month my life has been brutal to say the least. She deleted her history, most of the incriminating texts (a few hundreds), clean the trash, delete email messages, everything to cover her track. The only way I figured this our all of this out because I am quite fluent with the computer and Iphone, but It was hard work to recover deleted messages. I now know she is underground, because I realized she has another email account. So what do you say about this? Is a keylogger acceptable in this case? Oh, we been married for 20 years!
I don't think a keylogger is acceptable in your case.
She repeatedly lied to you and continues to cover up her tracks.
Spying on her and gathering evidence won't solve the problem, nothing will.
The only acceptable tactic is tell her you know everything and the marriage is OVER.
I sense your frustration here and I'm sorry. Like I said, in the end everyone has to assess the risks versus benefits of their decisions for themselves.
The only reason I've pointed out the legal aspect of the equation is to counter the notion that there are no risks.
When things get ugly and one spouse suspects the other of spying, their attorney may come to someone like me to document the existence of this software. If it exists, we'll tell them what it is and when it was installed. Their attorney will contact the publisher and they'll fall all over themselves to provide purchase information. This is another way the publishers protect themselves and they disclose the fact that they intend to fully cooperate with legal inquiries up front.
I don't personally understand why anyone would want to hand a cheating spouse a potential weapon like this, but then I've never been in that position and can only guess what it must be like.
What you sense is not frustration on my part. It is the assumption that someone is so weak as to let anything like what you are suggesting influence their actions they feel they need to take to save their marriage. Good input. Good to know. But seriously if this is going to deter someone that is sad indeed.
I am not a Betrayed Spouse. I was the one in the EA. My wife saved our marriage by looking at my emails. This happened almost 15 years ago. We have been married 35 years now.
Realize that most of us would already have enough information to terminate the relationship. However, if children are involved you can undsertand that this is their whole life. They feel the need to validate. If there is a prosecutor who feels that they need to crush someone who is trying to save their marriage then so beit.
I am suggesting that if one has a pre-nup they include this as well.
I understand where you are coming from on the risks. There are all sorts of risks.
__________________
Rectitude--Courage--Benevolence--Respect--Honesty--Honor--Loyalty
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
"Why do we fall? So we might learn to pick ourselves up."
"It’s not who we are underneath, but what we do that defines us."
__________________
Rectitude--Courage--Benevolence--Respect--Honesty--Honor--Loyalty
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
"Why do we fall? So we might learn to pick ourselves up."
"It’s not who we are underneath, but what we do that defines us."
What you sense is not frustration on my part. It is the assumption that someone is so weak as to let anything like what you are suggesting influence their actions they feel they need to take to save their marriage. Good input. Good to know. But seriously if this is going to deter someone that is sad indeed.
Maybe 'frustration' was a poor word choice, but frankly that's how the temptation to resort to something illegal comes across to me when there are so many legal things a person can do first. Why kill a fly with a shotgun if a folded piece of newspaper will do?
There is nothing illegal about a simple proxy server in the home. There's nothing illegal about enabling logging and examining the resultant logs in a firewall appliance or router. If a suspicious pattern emerges, there's nothing illegal about a heart to heart on the subject of transparency and if that doesn't work right away, there's nothing illegal about a service like Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, etc. becoming temporarily 'unavailable.' And there's nothing illegal about fake profiles in and of themselves.
I actually haven't advocated weakness or doing nothing and I've repeatedly said that sometimes you 'gotta do what you gotta do' when it comes to these things.
Maybe 'frustration' was a poor word choice, but frankly that's how the temptation to resort to something illegal comes across to me when there are so many legal things a person can do first. Why kill a fly with a shotgun if a folded piece of newspaper will do?
There is nothing illegal about a simple proxy server in the home. There's nothing illegal about enabling logging and examining the resultant logs in a firewall appliance or router. If a suspicious pattern emerges, there's nothing illegal about a heart to heart on the subject of transparency and if that doesn't work right away, there's nothing illegal about a service like Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, etc. becoming temporarily 'unavailable.' And there's nothing illegal about fake profiles in and of themselves.
I actually haven't advocated weakness or doing nothing and I've repeatedly said that sometimes you 'gotta do what you gotta do' when it comes to these things.
I almost went down the road you are mentioning. I probably would opt for this approach if any myself.
So we can agree here that there are things possible that get the job done at less risk. The 80 / 20 if nothing else.
Like I said I am unlikely to go to the extremes on this stuff personally. I leave the detailed snopping expertise to other who have felt the need to do so.
If there was false transparency I would only need a small amount of information that showed there was another unknown account. That would be enough for me. I would have every right to make sure my private lan was protected from malicious activities.
If I happened to catch my spouse doing something secret, so be it. They said it was not them after all. Someone must have hacked in.
__________________
Rectitude--Courage--Benevolence--Respect--Honesty--Honor--Loyalty
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
"Why do we fall? So we might learn to pick ourselves up."
"It’s not who we are underneath, but what we do that defines us."
Up until 1 year ago, I had the perfect marriage. I used to close my eyes and thank God that I didn't have the problems that many of the other people I know have in their marriages, that my wife was 100% honest with me, that we had no secrets, that she loved me heart and soul, was in love with me, and vice versa. I was blessed beyond belief...
A bad two weeks, my wife acting different, us not talking for two days, led to her saying "I don't know if I love you anymore". I couldn't figure out what was happening, but I started snooping, and then I found out a LOT. She had been planning to leave the marriage for some time. She had incredibly unhappy, despite telling me different. She had gone to see an ex boyfriend while visiting family 2000 miles away. Later I found a maxed out credit card that she had lied to me about, still later that she was still friends with this guy on Facebook and she was hiding it from me, lying to me again, and again...
So, presently:
My life feels like it is ruined, I do not sleep well at night, I have difficulty getting out of bed in the morning, focusing at work, constant pain in my chest (feels like my heart breaking), and I'm so clingy that, even though my wife and I are trying to work it out, my own behavior seems to be pushing us to the point of fracture now. I take anti depressants and anti anxiety medications, I hate the job I used to love, and on and on... instead of enjoying life I question why the f I'm even here anymore
So anyone in here that talks about how they would NEVER install a key logger, etc, or that it is so wrong, I was in your shoes at one time. I have still never used one but I do snoop on her phone and computer, not very often but maybe once every couple of months. It absolutely SUCKS, because I fear I will never trust anyone that way ever again. Something beautiful was completely ruined, like taking a 120,000 dollar sports car and smashing it into a wall at 100 mph... you have to take a ton of time and effort just to get it back to where it at least LOOKS like it resembles that same wonderful car, but it will never be the same.
I don't want to snoop, I wish I could break the habit, but now I'm stuck... the bottom line is that broken trust breaks EVERYTHING...
I don't believe in entrapment (false IDs), but you better bet I believe in monitoring the keystrokes and calls/texts of my SPOUSE. Their actions directly affect me and my family so I darn will monitor if I suspect something is harming us.
the betrayal is there when you use these tactics. of course your spouse will not come out and say "yeah you caught me, ha ha ha" but fake profiles and keyloggers to me is a violation of privacy if i want to talk to a friend, family or tam and I my wife is reading my every word, that would piss me off when all she has to do is ask.
why?
What are you saying you wouldn`t say in front of your wife?
My wife can read my e-mails all she wants.
Couldn`t care less and I certainly wouldn`t consider it a "betrayal".
That`s ridiculous.
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And to those where this is a reoccuring issue...common denominator? and yes I have been cheated on by a girl before but it is kinda obvious especially if you pay attention to your relationships.
You are naive.
I`ve been a cheater, I`ve rarely ever been caught, I`m sad to say I`m damn good at it.
I can lie, and deceive better than anyone I know.
My wife knows I have this ability.
I know she`s a very cunning little wench herself, it`s part of why I married her.
I trust no one explicitly.
Read this forum for a little while.
The deception, and lying, and tech capability for cheating will make you nauseous.
Many of these people have been jumping from affair to affair behind their spouses backs for years never being caught.
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Re: keyloggers, fake profiles, spying? 
