In 2012, a 25-year-old advertising executive in Singapore had a routine. She waited until her live-in boyfriend fell asleep, then spent about two minutes going through his phone. She checked his Facebook and Pinterest accounts, SMSes, notes, Safari history and WhatsApp messages. When he changed his passcode, she watched his fingers to learn the new one.
She started at the beginning of the relationship. She said he had a roving eye and she had a gut feeling he was holding things back. Her checks showed that he had stayed in touch with a former girlfriend, which he first denied, and that he had been telling people he was single. She ended the relationship after less than a year. She admitted some regret, saying she sometimes wished she had stayed happily ignorant. Even so, she said she would check future boyfriends’ phones if something seemed off, and that she still looked at her ex’s phone after they became friends.
How the checking worked
She said all her friends kept tabs on their boyfriends in some way, by checking their phones or looking them up on Facebook. Public figures talked about it too that year. In August 2012, radio DJ Vernetta Lopez’s autobiography, Memoirs of a DJ, described how she found a love letter in her then-husband’s car boot, then watched him from a friend’s car to confirm what she suspected. The same month, Sunday Times columnist Sumiko Tan wrote that she regularly read her husband’s SMSes, e-mails and letters, with his permission, and called herself a “cyber snoop”.
Psychologist Daniel Koh of Insights Mind Centre said in 2012 that social media gave people “eyes and ears” from many sources. Raymond Lim, founder of APAC Investigation & Consultancy, pointed to WhatsApp’s online status. Women watched whether a boyfriend appeared online without replying, and some checked whether his status matched that of a suspected other woman.
When it went further
Lim said in 2012 that younger women had started hiring him to follow their boyfriends, at S$3,000 to S$4,000 a week. Before that, his clients had mostly been women in their 30s and 40s. He was taking three to four of these cases a month, and he said the men were usually caught cheating. He added that men also checked their girlfriends’ phones, but that women paid closer attention to details such as the time stamps on messages.
Divorce lawyer Tan Siew Kim, then at RHT Law Taylor Wessing, described clients who went through credit card statements, wallets and post, and one who installed spyware on her husband’s devices. She said explicit WhatsApp messages could sometimes be used in court to prove adultery, since a whole chat history could be e-mailed off a phone in seconds.
A 26-year-old teacher recalled getting e-mails from a male friend’s fiancée. The fiancée believed the two had dated, which they never had. She had been going through her fiancé’s phone, contacting his female friends and deleting numbers. A 25-year-old production assistant spent about three years checking her boyfriend’s Facebook, e-mail and texts during a five-year relationship. She once worked out his password after three days of guessing. That led her to a photo of another woman wearing a shirt she had bought him, and she ended the relationship.
Advice then, and research since
Koh warned in 2012 that some women were not ready for what they found, and that the shock could lead to irrational thinking. Karen Khng, founder of the dating agency Love Script, suggested asking yourself whether you could cope with the answers, and whether you would be happy if you stayed after finding out he had cheated.
Later studies give the question numbers. In a 2013 UK study of 2,081 adults reported in The Telegraph, 62% of men and 34% of women said they had secretly gone through a current or former partner’s phone. In the same study, 31% said they would consider ending the relationship if they found out their partner had read their texts.
Researchers from the University of British Columbia and the University of Lisbon recruited 102 people and asked them to recall past situations where they accessed the phone of someone they know. Of the 46 participants who provided information about relationship outcomes, 21 said a relationship ended because of snooping. Study author Ivan Beschastnikh said relationships ended “either because the phone owner felt their trust was betrayed or the relationship was experiencing other difficulties also”. Those who looked gave jealousy, control, money or a prank as their reasons, and the most common moment was while the phone’s owner was in the shower or the bathroom.
A WhistleOut survey of 1,600 Americans, reported by KGTV, found that 56 percent of women and 44 percent of men had snooped on a partner’s phone, while 61 percent said it is never acceptable. Among those who had looked, 34 percent did learn their partner was flirting with another person, and 21 percent found out their partner was cheating. The same survey found that 72 percent of people in relationships share cell phone passcodes.