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Technology Heats Up the Adultery Arms Race
HughPickens.com writes: Michelle Cottle reports in The Atlantic that today, spouses have easy access to an array of sophisticated spy software that record every keystroke; compile detailed logs of calls, texts, and video chats; that track a phone's location in real time; recover deleted messages from all manner of devices (without having to touch said devices); and that turn phones into wiretapping equipment. One might assume that the proliferation of such spyware would have a chilling effect on extramarital activities. But according to Cottle, aspiring cheaters need not despair: software developers are also rolling out ever stealthier technology to help people conceal their affairs. Right or wrong, cheating apps tap into a potentially lucrative market and researchers regard the Internet as fertile ground for female infidelity in particular. "Men tend to cheat for physical reasons and women for emotional reasons," says Katherine Hertlein. "The Internet facilitates a lot of emotional disclosure and connections with someone else."
But virtual surveillance has its risks. Stumbling across an incriminating email your partner left open is one thing; premeditated spying can land you in court. A Minnesota man named Danny Lee Hormann, suspecting his wife of infidelity, installed a GPS tracker on her car and allegedly downloaded spyware onto her phone and the family computer. In March 2010, Hormann's wife had a mechanic search her car and found the tracker. She called the police, and Hormann spent a month in jail on stalking charges. "I always tell people two things: (1) do it legally, and (2) do it right," says John Paul Lucich, a computer-forensics expert and the author of Cyber Lies, a do-it-yourself guide for spouses looking to become virtual sleuths. Lucich has worked his share of ugly divorces, and he stresses that even the most damning digital evidence of infidelity will prove worthless in court — and potentially land you in trouble — if improperly gathered. His blanket advice: Get a really good lawyer.
But virtual surveillance has its risks. Stumbling across an incriminating email your partner left open is one thing; premeditated spying can land you in court. A Minnesota man named Danny Lee Hormann, suspecting his wife of infidelity, installed a GPS tracker on her car and allegedly downloaded spyware onto her phone and the family computer. In March 2010, Hormann's wife had a mechanic search her car and found the tracker. She called the police, and Hormann spent a month in jail on stalking charges. "I always tell people two things: (1) do it legally, and (2) do it right," says John Paul Lucich, a computer-forensics expert and the author of Cyber Lies, a do-it-yourself guide for spouses looking to become virtual sleuths. Lucich has worked his share of ugly divorces, and he stresses that even the most damning digital evidence of infidelity will prove worthless in court — and potentially land you in trouble — if improperly gathered. His blanket advice: Get a really good lawyer.
If you feel the need to use these tools, your relationship is already in trouble.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
arrest? maybe if you're well connected.
conviction? only if you can pick the right jury
No, not at all. shovel your shit elsewhere.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I know this is meant tongue-in-cheek, but if taken at face value it's completely wrong. I've been married for about 20 years. I think the pleasures of being married to my wife this long, and of her being able to trust me, and of not having betrayed my family, far outweigh any benefit I would have gotten from succumbing to the temptation to cheat.
So aspiring cheaters should actually despair that some technology increases their temptation to cheat. In my estimation, they're just being more tempted to make a mistake.
Kiddie phone from Verizon. He is clinging to his 2004 state of the art clamshell phone that is at best a feature phone with no features actually supported any more besides phone calls, calendar, and text messages. In the meantime, I have not one but two Samsung galaxies.
On the one hand, even if I wanted to spy on him, I couldn't. On the other hand, his texts cost him 10 cents each on a grandfathered pre-paid plan, and he certainly can't install or run any kind of app on it. So the few texts he make can be counted in dimes (and he gets grouchy when someone texts him too much as a result) and there's no way to hide them or delete them. I'm not terribly worried either way.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Only if you aren't their legal guardian and do it without their consent - in which it's not only illegal but you're also horrible person.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Perhaps it's unthinkable in American minds, but here in the Netherlands, only about half of the people in solid relationships decide to marry. And there seems to be no set time for this either. More often than not, I've seen friends marry after their first child.
I'm not marrying, the odds are decidedly in favor of women. The Netherlands has the highest percentage of women working parttime. As a man, you'll be paying through the nose.
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Pretty pathetic, really. If you can't trust your spouse/S.O./fuckbuddy without spyware, maybe you need to find a new spouse/S.O./fuckbuddy. If you are unhappy enough with said spouse/S.O./fuckbuddy to cheat and haven't got the guts to just leave, screw you anyway.
Because throwing your kids' lives into turmoil is the better course? For some people quietly cheating is a better option, believe it or not, many marriages survive affairs and are still rated as average to above.
Sometimes the right answer is to leave, anyone who tells you the right answer is ALWAYS to leave or ALWAYS to stay is selling you some sort of moralistic bullcrap.
This is two weeks ago, but I don't think it popped up on Slashdot;
Feds charge tech CEO with making app for stalkers, domestic abusers
Although people are usually quick to defend the tool (and its makers) and suggest authorities go after its users instead, similar stories from the past seem to suggest that not very many would be jumping to his defense:
Man Creates "Creepy" Stalking App
World's Creepiest iPhone App Pulled After Outcry
Simple solution, Always be honest in your relationship!
My wife and my girlfriend get along great, even take them out shopping together. The only issue I have is when we all go out, I can not get a word in edge wise.
Keep it honest and there is no need for all those tools.
Kids have cell phones at younger and younger ages. You can argue if this is good or not but if they do have them, then it would be a nice feature and provide some peace of mind if you could call up their location (OK, the location of the phone) via a web app.
Are they late getting home and not answering their phone? If the locations service says they are at a friends house, then fine. If it says they are on I-35 traveling north at 80 MPH....not so fine.
Lojack for your kids.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
But how about a person who's suffered years of emotional abuse "knowing" their spouse is cheating without being able to prove it?
That's their own damn problem. None of it justifies spying on someone like that without their consent.
This was perfectly predictable when those who said "adultery is a private, consensual matter" won the argument and adultery effectively became a dead letter crime and tort. If adultery were reasonably enforced on those with licensed marriages, it would create a much greater argument for regulating these apps.
See funny thing is most people don't regard marriage as something where good behavior is strictly optional. When you take away recourse to the courts on the worse forms of betrayal in a state-recognized relationship, people are bound to take private action.
It's not? Why not?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Read a lot into things? I'll admit cayenne's usage was borderline, but when I talk about "my woman" I don't mean "the woman I own" I mean "the woman I'm pairing with", as opposed to the 3.5+ billion women in the world whose happiness and well-being have negligible impact on my life. She is my woman, I'm her man, no power imbalance implied. How would *you* phrase that? After all we're not married, and I'm not in the habit of referring to grown women as girls.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Call me a luddite, but I still use the traditional method. I can't see why any self-respecting Christian would turn to this technology when the answer is right there in the Bible!
The Test for an Unfaithful Wife
11 Then the Lord said to Moses, 12 “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘If a man’s wife goes astray and is unfaithful to him 13 so that another man has sexual relations with her, and this is hidden from her husband and her impurity is undetected (since there is no witness against her and she has not been caught in the act), 14 and if feelings of jealousy come over her husband and he suspects his wife and she is impure—or if he is jealous and suspects her even though she is not impure— 15 then he is to take his wife to the priest. He must also take an offering of a tenth of an ephah[c] of barley flour on her behalf. He must not pour olive oil on it or put incense on it, because it is a grain offering for jealousy, a reminder-offering to draw attention to wrongdoing.
16 “‘The priest shall bring her and have her stand before the Lord. 17 Then he shall take some holy water in a clay jar and put some dust from the tabernacle floor into the water. 18 After the priest has had the woman stand before the Lord, he shall loosen her hair and place in her hands the reminder-offering, the grain offering for jealousy, while he himself holds the bitter water that brings a curse. 19 Then the priest shall put the woman under oath and say to her, “If no other man has had sexual relations with you and you have not gone astray and become impure while married to your husband, may this bitter water that brings a curse not harm you. 20 But if you have gone astray while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband”— 21 here the priest is to put the woman under this curse—“may the Lord cause you to become a curse[d] among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. 22 May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.”
“‘Then the woman is to say, “Amen. So be it.”
23 “‘The priest is to write these curses on a scroll and then wash them off into the bitter water. 24 He shall make the woman drink the bitter water that brings a curse, and this water that brings a curse and causes bitter suffering will enter her. 25 The priest is to take from her hands the grain offering for jealousy, wave it before the Lord and bring it to the altar. 26 The priest is then to take a handful of the grain offering as a memorial[e] offering and burn it on the altar; after that, he is to have the woman drink the water. 27 If she has made herself impure and been unfaithful to her husband, this will be the result: When she is made to drink the water that brings a curse and causes bitter suffering, it will enter her, her abdomen will swell and her womb will miscarry, and she will become a curse. 28 If, however, the woman has not made herself impure, but is clean, she will be cleared of guilt and will be able to have children.
29 “‘This, then, is the law of jealousy when a woman goes astray and makes herself impure while married to her husband, 30 or when feelings of jealousy come over a man because he suspects his wife. The priest is to have her stand before the Lord and is to apply this entire law to her. 31 The husband will be innocent of any wrongdoing, but the woman will bear the consequences of her sin.’”
Numbers 5:11-31
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Oh great, so now if you are going to marry someone, you have them sign a document consenting to being stalked (or at least orally agree to it). Then what? If you refuse to sign something like that, what kind of a marriage is it? It means your partner and yourself are not truly combined into a single unit. Insecurities can develop, and people do cheat. Doesn't a person have to right to verify the integrity of their partner. Cheating on a spouse is a kind of fraud. People DO get lied to. If the government wants to verify something you say, they can. Why can't private citizens?
If my wife were to have sex with someone else behind my back, I'd be disappointed.
She knows I like to at least watch!
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
I guess not anymore. (Sorry.)
www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/10/27/scary-stalker-husband-in-the-legal-clear-to-track-wifes-car/
> But how about a person who's suffered years of emotional abuse "knowing" their spouse is cheating without being able to prove it?
What is the point of proving it? You don't get double-divorced if you can prove it. You don't get more money if you prove it. Decide to stay together or split up, then do it.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
One who has fifty loves, has fifty woes. One who has no loves, has no woes.
And the term "Good" lawyer is an oxymoron.
Probably much of modern pharmacology operates on that.
Interestingly if users beleieve apps have the power too whether they really work.
Pretty pathetic, really. If you can't trust your spouse/S.O./fuckbuddy without spyware, maybe you need to find a new spouse/S.O./fuckbuddy. If you are unhappy enough with said spouse/S.O./fuckbuddy to cheat and haven't got the guts to just leave, screw you anyway.
Never trust a woman or a government:
-Yellowbeard
There are already decryption utilities that we use to decrypt all of Microsoft products, this will be one more. However, there are technologies that are already out that can make our job harder. These are file-shredding utilities, which overwrite data numerous times making it impossible to recover the data. However, we often get some of the data back because users get lazy in using the shredding utility and some shredding utilities are not the best quality and do a horrible job.
Disk encryption > file shredding, 100 times over. Yes, BitLocker shouldn't be trusted because of the NSA, but, even if the NSA did backdoor it, it would still be impenetrable to standard law enforcement. Handwaving this problem away is either bluster or ignorance. Either way, he's a hack.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
It is non-obvious what you are talking about. Do you mean to say that marriage is evil?
Perception is the thin dividing line between reality and fiction.
The guy got arrested for putting a GPS tracker on her car, but what about hiring private eyes? Is that even a real thing or just something on TV? Isn't it still stalking if you are hiring someone else to do the stalking?
X
Under any other circumstances, when two people enter into a contract, and one of the individuals is suspected of breaking the contract, the other usually has recourse to investigate that, especially when it only involves tracking an object they own in unison.
"simple solution" I don't think you know what 'simple' means.
Because throwing your kids' lives into turmoil is the better course? For some people quietly cheating is a better option, believe it or not, many marriages survive affairs and are still rated as average to above.
Children are not oblivious. They can tell when there are problems in their parents' relationship. What sort of relationship role models are parents who have really dysfunctional relationships? They give a really horrible idea about what romantic relationships *should* be to the children exposed to them.
That's not to say (for all the not-so-deep thinkers out there) that a couple should split up at the first signs of problems, but when it becomes clear that the issues in the relationship are intractable, staying together "for the children" is not only dumb, it may well be harmful to the children later in life.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
I have heard a suggestion that they had some sort of poison that reacts differently when someone is anxious vs calm. Think of it like a polygraph test with potential physical consequences. It could well have had better than chance odds of affecting the guilty (anxious) more than the innocent (calm). And no doubt the priests could have helped with that, by telling them "don't worry, God knows" and all the ceremony. Of course, this is all speculation as no one knows exactly what the stuff was. And being "better than chance" isn't even saying much.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
In Arizona, it is a one party state for recording and you are automatically a party to things on your property. So you can record someone using your phone, without prior notification.
Not that it is the same as tracking someone all over via GPS, just saying recording laws vary greatly by state.
Actually score multiple points there for open relationships. One problem my wife and I have never had is having to worry the least bit about these issues. One of us wants to do a little dating or fool around with someone we just.... are honest about it.
Its amazing that nobody ever thought of this before, it really is a lot easier, cheaper, and more reliable, not to mention less stress. That way we can argue about important things like the housework.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
As if you needed one ...
Marriage is the state's business and most people strongly believe that. If they didn't, they'd support the abolition of all of the legal rules pertaining to it including presumptive paternity, alimony and child support. Marriage also forms the basis of most families since the history of recorded civilization which means marriage is the vehicle by which society is regenerated. To say there is no state interest there is laughable. What you do to your marriage may typically be of minimal interest to the state or none, but a serious breach like adultery is not.
But even setting that aside, you have no right to "give consent" to someone other than your spouse. You swore away that right once you got married. No, you don't "own your spouse" but you and your spouse pledged mutual fidelity in a politically and legally important, state-sanctioned relationship. Don't like that? That's cool, just live as an unmarried couple.
Marriage is the state's business and most people strongly believe that.
I don't care what most people strongly believe.
Marriage also forms the basis of most families since the history of recorded civilization which means marriage is the vehicle by which society is regenerated.
It's just a title. It is not some magical thing which allows society to continue. Take your religious nonsense elsewhere.
but a serious breach like adultery is not.
There is no "serious breach"; your puritanism is showing.
But even setting that aside, you have no right to "give consent" to someone other than your spouse.
Yes, you do.
You swore away that right once you got married.
You can't swear your sexuality away. If any laws say otherwise, they're broken and need to be fixed, just like contracts which sign you into slavery are invalid.
The government should get out of people's private business.
Once you drop the idea of owning your partner, they become pretty simple relationships.