Are You An Accountable Digital Dater?
Emerging technologies have created an atmosphere where privacy is hard to find, and this can be troublesome for relationships.
In this day and age, the use of social dating apps like Tinder, Happn, and Bumble have become entirely commonplace. Gone is the stigma that used to be associated with dating online; today, it’s a totally normal and acceptable way to negotiate modern romance for young and old daters alike.
Does Technology Make Us Uneasy In Relationships?
However, alongside the rise of location and mobile-based dating apps have come a lot of insecurity for a group of people you might not expect: those firmly in relationships. Whether two partners met on such an app or not, the constant availability of potential dating mates by way of logging into an app can be a major point of vulnerability for a relationship. Jealousy, insecurity, and dishonesty can start to feel ever present when a portal to greener dating pastures is always just a few swipes and clicks away.
As is customary in the digital app world, there has been an increase in services and mobile apps to address this kind of mobile dating-caused insecurity. Whether it’s Swipebuster, which allows partners to track their partner’s phone activity on their phone without the other person knowing, or spyware such as FlexiSpy or mSpy, it’s clear that jealousy and insecurity are high in the modern dating context. However enterprising they might be to respond to this niche market, these apps and their usage beg an important question when it comes to digital autonomy and security: if it’s not acceptable to override someone’s privacy if they’re a stranger, why is it okay to do if you happen to be dating someone?
The Privacy Double Standard
In the analogue dating world, if a person were to hire someone to follow their partner or install a hidden camera, it would have been considered an outright invasion of privacy. But in the modern age when you can pay a small fee to see if your partner has logged into their Tinder profile in the past few days, it’s viewed as totally normal. It’s one thing to do this the old-fashioned way—snooping on their phone while they’re not in the room—but when a company actually offers this as a service and makes money off of it, the ethics suddenly become very murky.
One of the fundamentals of digital autonomy and citizenship is to respect someone else’s privacy as you’d hope they would respect yours. Small points of etiquette like reading a text that you’re not supposed to, or reading an email they’re drafting over their shoulder, are considered rude and ill-mannered, so how can more sophisticated forms of snooping be considered okay?
In some cases, it’s not—at least legally speaking. As The Guardian reported on this technology: “Since Swipebuster uses public data, the website is lawful, but in most states it is illegal to track information from someone’s device without their consent, according to David Klein, a lawyer who specializes in technology and marketing law. Many spyware companies will claim their products are designed for the legal purposes of monitoring minors or in some cases company employees, but their websites usually also market to suspicious husbands and wives.”
How To Avoid The Digital Dilemma
For couples who are looking to stay accountable to each other, there are more ethical ways methods. For example, both parties can opt in to having their digital habits under surveillance apps such as Couple Tracker and mCouple, giving partners the ability to access one another’s phone activities including text messages, phone calls, social media activity and GPS. While this is a step up from the clandestine methods, it’s still worth considering that if you feel your relationship needs this kind of extreme accountability, perhaps it is a problem that can’t be solved by an app.
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