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From: Brian G <mildew_spores@blueyonder.co.uk>
Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.d,soc.subculture.bondage-bdsm,soc.support.depression.crisis
Subject: Re: Core of many stories - The Adultery Arms Race
Date: Sun, 01 Apr 2018 09:22:16 +0100
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===================
Nobody mentioned the drug dealers favourite toy, the burner phone. Buy them
with a random number, and then ditch them.
Brian
--
-----
Mildew_spores@blueyonder.co.uk is the alter ego of
Brian G.
Anything goes here.
"a425couple" <a425couple@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:p9ivg50kd9@news7.newsguy.com...
> 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
>
> Like The Atlantic's family coverage? Subscribe to The Family Weekly, our
> free newsletter delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning.
> Email
>
> 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.
>
> Share Tweet
> ABOUT THE AUTHOR
> Michelle Cottle
> MICHELLE COTTLE is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.