You’ll remember that adage that ‘just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t after you’, well that can just as easily go for internet snooping and Facebook stalking too. With the press full of stories about celebrities getting their voicemail hacked, explaining how it’s done and how you should protect yourself we should all be taking better care of our data security but the hacking could be coming from an unexpected quarter.
Students at East Carolina University in North Carolina were questioned on the subject of security and surveillance and the researchers found that people weren’t snooping strangers but their partners. Indeed approximately a third of the female respondents said they had hacked their partners’ email accounts, men on the other hand are less likely to do this though, they opt for hidden cameras, spyware and the GPS in their other half’s phones to monitor their activities. (It’s interesting that this evidence would also lend weight to the theory that men prefer visual methods of communication while women prefer linguistic.)
Sloane Burke took the opportunity to ask around 800 students to complete a survey which asked if they had used technology to monitor their partners’ on more than one occasion and, of those who disclosed their gender in the survey, two thirds were female. Of these women, 34 per cent had opened their partner’s email on more than one occasion while only 14 per cent of the men had done so, the results also disclosed that women were more likely to check on social media like Facebook to see what their partners had been up to as well as delving into their mobile phone histories.
Male spies admitted using ‘fun’ technology to keep their eyes on their partners, 3 percent said that they had put cameras into their partners rooms and 5 percent said that they regularly used online mobile phone trackers to keep apprised of their partners’ location. Burke said that “only a small percentage of the men used GPS technology in this way, but we are still shocked.”
By way of explanation, if not excuse, for this the senior technology consultant at the UK cyber security company Sophos said that: “Many guys are technology freaks and if they have decided they wish to snoop on their partner then it’s all the more ‘fun’ to use technology to do so.”
There were even some men and a handful of women who admitted that they had decided to install spyware on their partner’s computer, 2 percent of the men had installed software onto their partner’s computer that enabled them to view their partners screen remotely in real time.
Dan Cash has taken to having mobile phone conversations next to noisy tumble driers and hiding other incriminating evidence in various fridge freezers about the campus. 