SOME people who have not experienced an invasion of privacy do not understand what a breach of privacy might be, and if so, they may not likely understand their own personal rights?
Most people own a computer or cell phone or tablet or some electronic device these days, and without knowing what a privacy breach is, you could be in for some really bad news. Usually because once your privacy has been breached, it cannot exactly be "un-breached?"
Especially during COVID, I believe the courts will not
take kindly to a breach of any fiduciary duties at all?
There are actually many things that can constitute an invasion of privacy, you may want to look at the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) https://www.eff.org/
Some of these issues could become problems in custody, visitation, divorce, community property issues and far, far more. Spouses spying on each other is not that uncommon. so if you are going to get a divorce or are in the middle of one, you should be more careful. Attorney has seen one spouse simply close all joint credit cards without any notice to spouse, leaving the spouse both stranded, and unable to even buy food or gasoline?
Never leave or lend your phone or computer, tablet or any other electronic device which could be synced to the spouse or anyone you believe will or could spy on you. If you do not understand what syncing means you can go look it up. It is a fact that far too many people sync all their data, which can have a very bad result down the line if problems come up, especially if it's all personal data and not business data.
Attorney never recommends syncing anything to be honest, that is strictly personal. One does not need to use that just because you "can" do it. Even if you do trust a spouse 100%, with texts, email, or even encrypted data; I don't even believe a spouse should know every password to everything.... all data can be examined by an expert (if your spouse went that far, as in example of female who won the lotto and hid it from the husband....)... this is an older information piece, but if you're not running a business, I believe it's still worthy to consider......https://www.msecure.com/blog/saving-passwords-best-practices/
IF you have a very jealous spouse, you should probably have a mechanic scan your vehicle for a tracking device--I know of two cases where this was done and two devices were, in fact, found on vehicles.
Learn the signs of how a spy app (stalkerware) could already BE on your phone or other electronic devices. (Attorney has a separate post on this on this same blog....) NEVER sync anything to any computer, tablet, or any other device. It may save some time, but you don't need to be lazy. If your ex takes all your data, you will not have access to it and will lose all the passwords most likely.
I always recommend that each spouse have a backup account/password and that your data is not stored ONLY on a joint account. I have seen spouses lose all their email and computer access because of over-sharing of accounts; then it becomes both tedious and expensive because you must spend hours opening new accounts, and start all over again?
Married spouses with separate accounts that were opened during marriage usually means there is a fiduciary duty to know what each other is doing with community funds.
Let's say wife inherited 100k and opened her own separate account; as long as nothing that went into that 100k account was community, but only wife's separate property funds went into the account, the tracing of that account should prove that wife owns all of it. But if wife took funds she earned in her job, like 10k, and put it into the account, a problem is created because now community money was added to a separate property account? This should always be avoided (so you don't create more tracing problems at divorce time!)
I have had cases where this happened during the client's time living in two separate counties, and it quickly became a nightmare. It is to be avoided if at all possible.
In fact, as I mentioned on another post, I had a client that already had all the text messages from all their phones (some kind of family plan arrangement) and in fact, the client found the sex texting of spouse with another person? Yes, they did get a divorce, no surprise there?
Make sure you already have copies of the tax returns because if he/she filed changed tax returns and you never saw the real tax returns you can be in big trouble (not that you did anything wrong) but you can order the last returns from the IRS for almost free anyway.
IF you are in charge of the phone bill, or home phone bills, or credit cards, you may have to look carefully at what is being purchased. Many spouses never even look at the bills and just pay them? I have known of several cases where the husband was not only conducting long distance affairs, he had at least one illegitimate kid from some gal in another city and by time the wife figured it out, the kid was not that young anymore?
If you don't know what bitcoin is, I suggest you go look it up. It is very difficult to find evidence of it but if you find it, it would likely be in the computer data the spouse owns. If your spouse guards the computer as if he/she is very afraid of something, it's fairly likely something is being hidden. https://www.exodus.io/blog/how-many-bitcoins-are-left/ https://techjury.net/blog/how-many-bitcoins-are-there/#gref
[*Attorney has access to people who know Bitcoin pretty well]
If your spouse loves to go to casinos, the casinos always send out tax information on winnings. There is a famous case from California on this issue where the wife won a huge amount on the CA lotto and never told the husband, she then later divorced the husband and he found out about the lotto accidentally; subsequently, he went to court to remedy this using the fact that ex wife used subterfuge to conceal the winnings won during marriage.
The court then awarded the entire amount to the husband because non disclosure like this is illegal? California law provides there is a fiduciary duty between spouses, thus if one party finds out about hidden assets, the game is on! Also, most judges in family law tend not to like cheating spouses?
