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Subject: Core of many stories - The Adultery Arms Race
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The Adultery Arms Race
Technology has made cheating on your spouse, or catching a cheater,
easier than ever. How digital tools are aiding the unfaithful and the
untrusting-and may be mending some broken marriages.
All illustrations by Kristian Hammerstad
MICHELLE COTTLE NOVEMBER 2014 ISSUE TECHNOLOGY
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jay's wife, ann, was supposed to be out of town on business. It was a
Tuesday evening in August 2013, and Jay, a 36-year-old IT manager, was
at home in Indiana with their 5-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son
when he made a jarring discovery. Their daughter had misplaced her iPad,
so Jay used the app Find My iPhone to search for it. The app found the
missing tablet right away, but it also located all the other devices on
the family's plan. What was Ann's phone doing at a hotel five miles from
their home?
His suspicions raised, Jay, who knew Ann's passwords, read through her
e-mails and Facebook messages. (Like others in this story, Jay asked
that his and Ann's names be changed.) He didn't find anything
incriminating, but neither could he imagine a good reason for Ann to be
at that hotel. So Jay started using Find My iPhone for an altogether
different purpose: to monitor his wife's whereabouts.
Into the Future
Technology's Next Generation
Two nights later, when Ann said she was working late, Jay tracked her
phone to the same spot. This time, he drove to the hotel, called her
down to the parking lot, and demanded to know what was going on. Ann
told him she was there posing for boudoir photos, with which she planned
to surprise him for his upcoming birthday. She said the photographer was
up in the room waiting for her.
Jay wanted to believe Ann. They'd been married for 12 years, and she had
never given him cause to distrust her. So instead of demanding to meet
the photographer or storming up to the room, Jay got in his car and
drove home.
Still, something gnawed at him. According to Ann's e-mails, the boudoir
photo shoot had indeed taken place-but on the previous day, Wednesday.
So her being at the hotel on Tuesday and again on Thursday didn't make
sense. Unless …
In an earlier era, a suspicious husband like Jay might have rifled
through Ann's pockets or hired a private investigator. But having
stumbled upon Find My iPhone's utility as a surveillance tool, Jay
wondered what other apps might help him keep tabs on his wife. He didn't
have to look far. Spouses now have easy access to an array of
sophisticated spy software that would give Edward Snowden night sweats:
programs that record every keystroke; that compile detailed logs of our
calls, texts, and video chats; that track a phone's location in real
time; that recover deleted messages from all manner of devices (without
having to touch said devices); that turn phones into wiretapping
equipment; and on and on.
Jay spent a few days researching surveillance tools before buying a
program called Dr. Fone, which enabled him to remotely recover text
messages from Ann's phone. Late one night, he downloaded her texts onto
his work laptop. He spent the next day reading through them at the
office. Turns out, his wife had become involved with a co-worker. There
were thousands of text messages between them, many X‑rated-an
excruciatingly detailed record of Ann's betrayal laid out on Jay's
computer screen. "I could literally watch her affair progress," Jay told
me, "and that in itself was painful."
One might assume that the proliferation of such spyware would have a
chilling effect on extramarital activities. Aspiring cheaters, however,
need not despair: software developers are also rolling out ever
stealthier technology to help people conceal their affairs. Married folk
who enjoy a little side action can choose from such specialized tools as
Vaulty Stocks, which hides photos and videos inside a virtual vault
within one's phone that's disguised to look like a stock-market app, and
Nosy Trap, which displays a fake iPhone home screen and takes a picture
of anyone who tries to snoop on the phone. cate (the Call and Text
Eraser) hides texts and calls from certain contacts and boasts tricky
features such as the ability to "quick clean" incriminating evidence by
shaking your smartphone. CoverMe does much of the above, plus offers
"military-grade encrypted phone calls." And in the event of an
emergency, there's the nuclear option: apps that let users remotely wipe
a phone completely clean, removing all traces of infidelity.
But every new app that promises to make playing around safer and easier
just increases the appetite for a cleverer way to expose such deception.
Some products even court both sides: a partner at cate walked me through
how a wife could install the app on her husband's phone to create a
secret record of calls and texts to be perused at her leisure. Which may
be great from a market-demand standpoint, but is probably not so healthy
for the broader culture, as an accelerating spiral of paranoia drives an
arms race of infidelity-themed weapons aimed straight at the consumer's
heart.
every tech trend has its early adopters. Justin, a 30-year-old computer
programmer from Ohio, is at the vanguard of this one.
Justin first discovered cate on the September 21, 2012, episode of Shark
Tank, ABC's venture-capital reality show. The Call and Text Eraser,
pitched specifically as a "cheating app," won $70,000 in seed money on
the program. Justin knew he had to have it.
His girlfriend at the time-we'll call her Scarlett-was "the jealous
type," forever poking through his smartphone and computer. Not that he
could blame her, given that she'd already busted him once for having sex
with another woman. "It took a lot of talking and a lot of promising
that it wouldn't happen again," he told me over e-mail. (I found Justin
through a user review of cate.) "So her wanting to check up on me was
understandable," he allowed. "But at the same time, it was my business
and if I wanted to share I would have."
Even a not-so-jealous girlfriend might have taken exception to many of
the messages on Justin's phone: "casual texting" (that is, flirting)
with other women, "hard core" (explicitly sexual) texting, texts
arranging "hookups." In the past, he'd been busted repeatedly for such
communiqués. (Scarlett is not the only girlfriend with whom Justin has
found monogamy to be a challenge.) With cate, all Justin had to do was
create a list of contacts he didn't want Scarlett to know about, and any
incriminating texts and phone calls with those contacts got channeled
directly into a pass-code-protected vault.
cate is just one of many tools Justin uses to, as he puts it, "stay one
step ahead." His go-to method for exchanging explicit photos is
Snapchat, the popular app that causes pics and videos to self-destruct
seconds after they are received. (Of course, as savvy users know,
expired "snaps" aren't really deleted, but merely hidden in the bowels
of the recipient's phone, so Justin periodically goes in and permanently
scrubs them.) And for visuals so appealing that he cannot bear to see
them vanish into the ether, he has Gallery Lock, which secretes pics and
videos inside a private "gallery" within his phone.
Justin wound up cheating on Scarlett "several more times" before they
finally broke up-a pattern he's repeated with other girlfriends. Oh,
sure, he enjoys the social and domestic comforts of a relationship
("It's always nice to have someone to call your girl"). He understands
the suffering that infidelity can cause ("I have been cheated on so I
know how much it hurts"). He even feels guilty about playing around. But
for him, the adrenaline kick is irresistible. "Not to mention," he adds,
"no woman is the same [and] there is always going to be someone out
there who can do something sexually that you have never tried." Then, of
course, there's "the thrill of never knowing if you are going to get
caught."
All of which makes it more than a little troubling that, while laboring
to keep one semiserious girlfriend after another in the dark with
privacy-enhancing apps, Justin has been equally aggressive about using
spy apps to keep a virtual eye on said girlfriends.
Therapists say they're seeing more spouses casually tracking each other,
and lawyers are starting to recommend digital-privacy clauses for prenup
and postnup agreements.
Justin has tried it all: keystroke loggers, phone trackers, software
enabling him to "see text messages, pictures, and all the juicy stuff …
even the folder to where your deleted stuff would go." He figures he's
tried nearly every spy and cheater app on the market, and estimates that
since 2007, he has "kept tabs," serially, on at least half a dozen
girlfriends. "The monitoring is really just for my peace of mind," he
says. Plus, if he catches a girlfriend straying, "it kind of balances it
out and makes it fair." That way, he explains, if she ever busts him, "I
have proof she was cheating so therefore she would have no reason to be
mad."
Not that Justin is immune to the occasional flash of jealousy. More than
once, he has gone out to confront a girlfriend whose phone revealed her
to be somewhere other than where she'd claimed to be. One relationship
ended with particularly dramatic flair: "The phone went to the location
off of a country road in the middle of nowhere and there she was having
sex in the backseat of the car with another man." A fistfight ensued
(with the guy, not the girlfriend), followed later by "breakup sex"
(vice versa). One year on, Justin says, "I still don't believe that she
has figured out how I found out."
Justin knows that many folks may find his playing both sides of the
cheating-apps divide "twisted." But, he reasons, "I am doing it for my
safety to make sure I don't get hurt. So doesn't that make it right??"
right or wrong, cheating apps tap into a potentially lucrative market:
While the national infidelity rate is hard to pin down (because, well,
people lie), reputable research puts the proportion of unfaithful
spouses at about 15 percent of women and 20 percent of men-with the
gender gap closing fast. And while the roots of infidelity remain more
or less constant (the desire for novelty, attention, affirmation, a
lover with tighter glutes … ), technology is radically altering how we
enter into, conduct, and even define it. (The affairs in this piece all
involved old-school, off-line sex, but there is a growing body of
research on the devastation wrought by the proliferation of online-only
betrayal.) 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, who studies the
impact of technology on relationships as the director of the Marriage
and Therapy Program at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. "The
Internet facilitates a lot of emotional disclosure and connections with
someone else."
At the same time, privacy has become a rare commodity. Forget the
National Security Agency and Russian mobsters: in a recent survey
conducted in the United Kingdom, 62 percent of men in relationships
admitted to poking around in a current or ex-partner's mobile phone.
(Interestingly, among women, the proportion was only 34 percent. So much
for the stereotype of straying guys versus prying gals.) On the flip
side, according to the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life
Project, 14 percent of adults have taken steps to hide their online
activity from a family member or romantic partner. Therapists say
they're seeing more spouses casually tracking each other as well as more
clashes over online spying, and lawyers are starting to recommend
digital-privacy clauses for prenup and postnup agreements. Such clauses
aim to prevent spouses from using personal texts, e‑mails, or photos
against each other should they wind up in divorce court.
Tech developers by and large didn't set out looking to get involved. As
is so often the case with infidelity, it just sort of happened. Take
Find My iPhone. Apple did not create the app with suspicious lovers in
mind, but users pretty quickly realized its potential. Dr. Fone is
marketed primarily as a way to recover lost data. Likewise, messaging
apps such as Snapchat have many more uses than concealing naughty talk
or naked photos, but the apps are a hit with cheaters.
The multipurpose nature and off-label use of many tools make it
difficult to gauge the size of this vast and varied market. The company
mSpy offers one of the top-rated programs for monitoring smartphones and
computers; 2 million subscribers pay between $20 and $70 a month for the
ability to do everything from review browsing history to listen in on
phone calls to track a device's whereabouts. Some 40 percent of
customers are parents looking to monitor their kids, according to Andrew
Lobanoff, the head of sales at mSpy, who says the company does basic
consumer research to see who its customers are and what features they
want added. Another 10 to 15 percent are small businesses monitoring
employees' use of company devices (another growing trend). The remaining
45 to 50 percent? They could be up to anything.
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Apps marketed specifically as tools for privacy and secret-keeping* for
the most part aren't seeing the download numbers of a heavy hitter like,
say, Grindr, the hookup app for gay men (10 million downloads and more
than 5 million monthly users). But plenty have piqued consumer interest:
The private-texting-and-calling app CoverMe has more than 2 million
users. TigerText, which (among other features) causes messages to
self-destruct after a set amount of time, has been downloaded 3.5
million times since its introduction in February 2010. (It hit the
market a couple of months after the Tiger Woods sexting scandal, though
the company maintains that the app is not named for Woods.)
Once the marketplace identifies a revenue stream, of course, the water
has been chummed and everyone rushes in for a taste. By now, new
offerings are constantly popping up from purveyors large and small.
Ashley Madison, the online-dating giant for married people (company
slogan: "Life is short. Have an affair."), has a mobile app that
provides some 30 million members "on the go" access to its services.
Last year, the company introduced an add-on app called BlackBook, which
allows users to purchase disposable phone numbers with which to conduct
their illicit business. Calls and texts are placed through the app much
as they are through Skype, explains the company's chief operating
officer, Rizwan Jiwan. "One of the leading ways people get caught in
affairs is by their cellphone bill," he observes. But with the
disposable numbers, all calls are routed through a user's Ashley Madison
account, which appears on his or her credit-card statements under a
series of business aliases. "The phone number isn't tied to you in any way."
Both sides of the arms race have ego invested in not getting outgunned.
Stressing Ashley Madison's obsession with customer privacy, Jiwan boasts
that the shift from computers to mobile devices makes it harder for
members to get busted. "It's much more difficult to get spyware on
phones," he told me. But mSpy's Lobanoff pushed back: "All applications
can be monitored. Let me make it clear for you. If you provide us what
application you would like to track, within two weeks we can develop a
feature to do that." It all boils down to demand. For instance, he
notes, after receiving some 300 calls from customers looking to monitor
Snapchat, the company rolled out just such a feature.
Lobanoff admits that iPhones are tougher to monitor than phones from
other brands, because Apple is strict about what runs on its operating
system (although many Apple users "jailbreak" their devices, removing
such limits). Which raises the question: Is an iPhone a good investment
for cheaters worried about being monitored-or would it too tightly
restrict their access to cheating apps? Such are the complexities of
modern infidelity.
of course, no app can remove all risk of getting caught. Technology can,
in fact, generate a false sense of security that leads people to push
limits or get sloppy. Justin has had several close calls, using cate to
conceal indiscreet texts and voicemails but forgetting to hide explicit
photos. When a girlfriend found a naked picture of him that he'd failed
to delete after sexting another woman, Justin had to think fast. "The
way I talk my way out of it is that I say I was going to send it to
her." Then, of course, there is the peril of creeping obsolescence:
after several months, regular upgrades to the operating system on
Justin's phone outpaced cate's, and more and more private messages began
to slip through the cracks. (A scan of user reviews suggests this is a
common problem.)
Virtual surveillance has its risks as well. Stumbling across an
incriminating e‑mail your partner left open is one thing; premeditated
spying can land you in court-or worse. Sometime in 2008 or 2009, 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. His now-ex-wife, Michele
Mathias (who denied having an affair), began wondering how her husband
always knew what she was up to. In March 2010, Mathias had a mechanic
search her car. The tracker was found. Mathias called the police, and
Hormann spent a month in jail on stalking charges. (It's worth noting
that a second conviction, specifically for illegally tracking her car,
was overturned on appeal when the judge ruled that joint ownership gave
Hormann the right to install the GPS tracker.)
Staying on the right side of the law is trickier than one might imagine.
There are a few absolute no-nos. At the top of the list: never install
software on a device that you do not own without first obtaining the
user's consent. Software sellers are careful to shift the legal burden
onto consumers. On its site, mSpy warns that misuse of the software "may
result in severe monetary and criminal penalties." Similarly, SpyBubble,
which offers cellphone-tracking software, reminds its customers of their
duty to "notify users of the device that they are being monitored." Even
so, questions of ownership and privacy get messy between married
partners, and the landscape remains in flux as courts struggle to apply
old laws to new technology.
In 2010, a Texas man named Larry Bagley was acquitted of charges that he
violated federal wiretapping laws by installing audio-recording devices
around his house and keystroke-monitoring software on his then-wife's
computer. In his ruling, the district judge pointed to a split opinion
among U.S. circuit courts as to whether the federal law applies to
"interspousal wiretaps." (The Fourth, Sixth, Eighth, Tenth, and Eleventh
Circuit Courts said it does, he noted; the Second and Fifth said it
doesn't.) Similarly, in California, Virginia, Texas, Minnesota, and as
of this summer New York, it is a misdemeanor to install a GPS tracker on
someone's vehicle without their consent. But when a vehicle is jointly
owned, things get fuzzy.
"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. Stat.
such apps clearly have the potential to blow up relationships, but the
question now may be whether they can be used to salvage them as well.
Many of the betrayed partners I spoke with believe they can.
A couple of years ago, Ginger discovered that her husband, Tim, was
having an affair with a woman he'd met through a nonprofit on whose
board he sat. (As Ginger tells it, this was a classic case of a
middle-aged man having his head turned by a much younger woman.) The
affair lasted less than a year, but it took another eight months before
Tim's lover stopped sending him gifts and showing up in awkward places
(even church!).
Ginger and Tim decided to tough it out-they've been married for 35 years
and have two adult children-but that took some doing. For the first year
and a half, certain things Tim did or said would trigger Ginger's
anxiety. He would announce that he was going to the store; Ginger would
fire up her tracking software to ensure he did just that. Business
travel called for even more elaborate reassurances. "When he was away, I
would be like, 'I want you to FaceTime the whole room-the bathroom, the
closet; open the hallway door.' "
Ginger's anxiety has dimmed, but not vanished. She still occasionally
uses Find My iPhone to make sure Tim is, in fact, staying late at the
office. "And we use FaceTime all the time. He knows that if I try to
FaceTime him, he'd better answer right then or have a very, very good
reason why he didn't."
Jay and Ann, of the boudoir photo shoot, also decided to try to repair
their marriage. When he first confronted her with a record of her texts,
Ann denied that the sex talk was ever more than fantasy. But when Jay
scheduled a polygraph, she confessed to a full-blown, physical affair.
As hard as it has been for Jay, one year later he reports that tech
tools are helping. Ann's affair grew out of her sense of neglect, Jay
told me: "She wasn't getting the attention she wanted from me, so she
found someone else to give it to her." To strengthen their bond, Jay and
Ann have started using Couple, a relationship app geared toward
promoting intimacy by setting up a private line of communication for
texts, pics, video clips, and, of course, updates on each person's
whereabouts. Every now and again, Jay sneaks a peek at Find My iPhone.
He also has set his iPad to receive copies of Ann's texts. "I don't know
if she realizes I'm doing that," he told me. But in general, she
understands his desire for extra oversight. "She's like, 'Whatever you
want.' "
In fact, post-affair surveillance seems to be an increasingly popular
counseling prescription. Even as marriage and family therapists take a
dim view of unprovoked snooping, once the scent of infidelity is in the
air, many become enthusiastically pro-snooping-initially to help uncover
the truth about a partner's behavior but then to help couples reconcile
by reestablishing accountability and trust. The psychotherapist and
syndicated columnist Barton Goldsmith says he often advocates virtual
monitoring in the aftermath of an affair. Even if a spouse never
exercises the option of checking up, having it makes him or her feel
more secure. "It's like a digital leash."
Once the scent of infidelity is in the air, many therapists encourage
snooping-to help uncover the truth, but also to reestablish
accountability and trust in couples looking to reconcile.
And that can be a powerful deterrent, says Frank, whose wife of 37 years
learned of his fondness for hookers last February, after he forgot to
close an e‑mail exchange with an escort. "He had set up a Gmail account
I had no idea he had," Carol, his wife, told me. Frank tried to convince
her that the e-mails were just spam, even after she pointed out that the
exchange included his cell number and photos of him.
Frank agreed to marriage counseling and enrolled in a 12-step program
for sexual addiction. Carol now tracks his phone and regularly checks
messages on both his phone and his computer. Still, she told me sadly,
"I don't think that I'm ever going to get the whole story. I believe he
thinks that if I know everything, the marriage will come to an end."
For his part, Frank-who comes across as a gruff, traditional sort of
guy, uneasy sharing his feelings even with his wife-calls Carol's
discovery of his betrayal "excruciating," but he mostly seems angry at
the oversexed culture that he feels landed him in this mess. He grumbles
about how "the ease and the accessibility and the anonymity of the
Internet" made it "entirely too easy" for him to feed his addiction.
Frank has clearly absorbed some of the language and lessons of therapy.
"As well as it is a learned behavior to act out, it is a learned
behavior not to," he told me. He doesn't much like his wife's having
total access to his phone, but he claims that his sole concern is for
the privacy of others in his 12-step group, who text one another for
support. Frank himself clearly feels the tug of his digital leash. "Now
that she checks my phone and computer, I have a deterrent."
Even as he calls virtual surveillance "a powerful tool," though, Frank
also declares it a limited one. No matter how clever the technology
becomes, there will always be work-arounds. For someone looking to
stray, "absolutely nothing is going to stop it," says Frank,
emphatically. "Nothing."
* The original version of this article stated incorrectly that TigerText
and CoverMe market themselves as tools for cheaters and jealous spouses.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michelle Cottle
MICHELLE COTTLE is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.