Modern devices simplify our life granting new possibilities and optimizing daily duties. Everyone has their smartphone with them around the day for the sake of personal comfort and benefits. Yet, when you file for divorce online in Virginia, your smartphone can be used against you by your spouse. They can spy on you via your favorite device without your consent and awareness.
The cases of cybercrimes within the divorce process are becoming more frequent with more tools and possibilities at hand. Learn more about digital spying and marriage termination and protect yourself from any similar troubles.
Means of Digital Spying
With the development of electronic spying, spy on spouse strategies and tools are becoming more difficult to notice and easier to use for a spying partner. Whether your spouse is suspecting you cheating on them or aiming to get a beneficial position in the case, they may exploit any of the following means:
- Tracking apps – tracking applications, such as Find My iPhone, Find My Friends, and even GPS, are expected to help people in locating each other and their devices. But they are often used for digital spying in divorce cases. Via similar programs, your spouse can easily track your location and moves anytime and use it as evidence in your divorce case.
- Parental control – parental control programs are intended to monitor the activities of your kids when they are browsing or using any apps on their devices. But in the hands of a suspicious spouse, the applications turn into perfect spying tools tracking your every action on the Internet and on your device.
- Spyware – modern spyware is not of restricted use anymore. Any person can download it on their partner’s phone and follow every move, text, call, and action of their spouse to use later in the case for their own benefit.
- Hidden bugs and cameras – the old-fashioned spying means – hidden bugs and cameras – do well these days, too. There are apps that turn on your camera every time you access the Internet and stream everything happening around you to your spouse. As to audio recording, some states claim it to be a crime unless at least one of the participants of the conversation is aware of being recorded. So, if you take part in the conversation you can lawfully record it.
- Direct access – sometimes your spouse doesn’t need any exquisite tools and gadgets to spy on you, they can simply access your smartphone data when you are not around. Still, it is only possible when you either have no password or your partner knows how to open your phone.
These are far from all the possible means spouses may spy on each other with the help of. With modern and easy-to-use apps, anyone can get to know private details about your life and use them against you unless you protect yourself.
Protective Strategies
Protecting yourself means that you have to apply security strategies to the gadgets you use most frequently, smartphones in most cases. Here are the simplest but most useful strategies to care about your personal cyber safety:
- Security update – change all passwords on your smartphone and accounts you think your spouse may know about. It is even better to create a new e-mail and connect all your accounts to it instead of the old one. Don’t store your passwords in an easily accessible place.
- Two-factor authentication – apply two-factor authentication to your smartphone and important accounts. This means that you will have to pass two steps of security before accessing your personal data. This may be a combination of password, fingerprint, eye scan, verification code sent to your registered device, and so on. So, if your spouse manages to hack your password, they will hardly cope with another security check without you knowing about it.
- Cloud safety – in most cases your personal data, photos, recordings, and more are uploaded to your iCloud or any other cloud storage. If you have shared storage with your spouse or your partner gets access to it in any way, they will gain a golden source of evidence to use against you in your divorce case. So, you should either disable the automatic upload of data from your smartphone or update privacy settings to guarantee the top security of your storage.
- Program settings – if any applications ask you permission to track your activities, location, have access to your contacts, photos, and other information, think twice before confirming. Or this may end in allowing third persons access to your private data via the very same program.
There is no need to get paranoid but your task is to protect your device from any information leak as much as you can. Otherwise, you will present your partner with a perfect opportunity to spy on you and exploit the gained facts against you.
Cybercrimes are not addressed properly on the legal level across the USA. It often happens that divorcees who spy on their partners get no punishment as a result. Or penalties applied are far smaller than the harm produced as a result of spying. So, your task is to care about your security yourself since no one will do it better for you. Update your privacy settings, stay away from suspicious apps, apply two-factor authentication, and care about the safety of your data storage so that neither your spouse nor any other person can get hold of your personal info and harm you in any way.
