Privacy Issues When Separating From Your Partner/Spouse
When separating parties often are faced with having to disentangle their digital lives from their partner, so to protect their personal information. This includes ensuring separation of access to many different online accounts and their passwords, and cloud computing with often automatic uploading of information, and increasingly important access to social media accounts.
Separating spouses are strongly encouraged to review and protect their information with new account passwords, including revising backup questions, and reviewing their account settings to ensure privacy.
Without doing so, one person can put themselves at considerable risk of letting their former spouses know the intimate details and communication they are having with others about their new life that they are embarking upon.
Many clients can be shocked to learn about these mistakes and sometimes after a lengthy period where their former spouse has been monitoring them. Former spouses can also go to the extent of Installing programs on devices such as cellphones, tablets and computers that record every keystroke or take images of the screen which are then recorded and controlled by this spyware as a permanent record.
Former spouses can take private information and share this with friends and family, employers and post information publicly for all to see. This information can be the most intimate of details or recorded content, pictures, videos, texts, emails etc.; content that you would never want anyone to see.
In cases where individuals are very concerned about this issue, it is critical that parties reset devices to factory settings so to better prevent security threats of this kind. Some business also run diagnostic support to review whether these programs exist on your device.
Clients do have recourse when this occurs and the courts in Canada are increasingly identifying privacy rights over content that clearly was never the intention of a party to have available outside of the parties’ relationship.
As a result, Canadian courts have handed down punitive measures against the party sharing this information as well as orders that this information be taken down publicly. These cease-and-desist orders can specifically target and eliminate actions where one’s privacy has been violated.
If you have concerns as to your privacy when separating from your spouse, take immediate and prudent steps to protect your information. To do so, kindly contact Family Central Law today for guidance tailored to your family law matter. Please contact us today for a free consultation with our family lawyers by calling our office at 1-866-278-4187, or emailing info@familycentrallaw.com, or by clicking on our consultation page.
