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Facebook, Friend of Divorce Lawyers
crimeandpunishment writes "A lot of Facebook users going through divorces have learned a very costly lesson about their privacy settings. In fact, for many of them their Facebook pages helped lead to the divorce in the first place. More than 80% of the members of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers say they've used or run into evidence gathered from Facebook and other social networking sites over the last five years — and some of them have some very entertaining stories to tell. 'Facebook is the unrivaled leader for turning virtual reality into real-life divorce drama,' said AAML's president."
WTF? What kind of @sshole is he? Oh, wait... my ex effectively did that with my daughter pre-facebook...
Well unless you have in-person contact with your lover in your day to day life, that can be a little hard -- how else will you arrange meetings and whatnot? The communication will need to happen at some point.
Are you fishing for tips or are you wrong on /. ?
Web-Mail account, registered solely for this purpose. Browser in privacy mode when you access it. You don't need crypto to keep something hidden, you need crypto if you want to keep something secret that you can't hide.
For the experts, or those with much to lose, there are lots of other options, but unless your spouse is a geek, they're overkill.
Disclosure: I worked on some of this stuff many years ago. Our target audience were civil rights activists who in many countries likewise need to communicate with at least plausible deniability. A geeky UN-affiliated NGO built systems where the local military police could confiscate their computers and find absolutely nothing incriminating.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
As always the issue here is not the type of information (data valuable to divorce lawyers) but the context in which it is gathered (Facebook search unbeknownst to the poster). And once again the usual responses will be - a) Poster is stupid, and b) Facebook is evil.
I tend to think that so long as you are empowered to share or not to share then all is well. With Facebook this is not the case. My sister shared a reasonably embarrassing photo of me with some mutual friends (some of which I work with) which was then shared with my whole building by whatever networking effect took over - nice!. I was not in control of this. Now you can argue that she could have done this pre-social networking site era - but she couldn't simple because she is not in physical contact with 99.5% of people in my building. Social networking makes ones dis-empowerment that much more pervasive.
Romantically? The belief that marriage is a romance-based commitment is probably the reason most of them fail. Why should one expect a marriage to survive only as long as a particular brand of hormone-based euphoria?
If you can't live with a person after the blinders are off, you shouldn't have gotten married to them in the first place -- so making that commitment with blinders on (and being "in love" is unquestionably blinding) is the first mistake.
Inasmuch as "cheating" involves breaking a promise, absolutely, every time. I never asked my wife for exclusivity -- and so while she's never broken it, neither would such be a dealbreaker.
I'm not into justifying my own behaviour, I talk about that with my partner, not with guys on /.
But I am seriously interested in the rational argument.
In my example of the business trip, the actual sex does not hurt anyone. Well, depending on what kind of fetish you're into... err, I disgres.
What does hurt is telling your wife. But what exactly is it that hurts? That is my question on rational analysis. Also, you can apply game theory and come up with the rational choice being not telling. At least that's what a payoff matrix comes to.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org