Category: Online safety and privacy

• Essay: How to Stay Anonymous on a Married Dating Site: Protecting Your Identity From the First Click to the First Kiss

  Nicola had been chatting to a man on the site for about a week when he signed off one evening with: “Night night, Nicola. Hope the audit goes well tomorrow.” She had never told him her surname. She had never told him her job. She certainly hadn’t mentioned the audit. It turned out he had…

• Everyone Guards Their Phone. Almost Nobody Guards Their Email.

  Ask a married dater what worries them and you’ll get the same answers in roughly the same order. The phone. The notifications. Whether the app is hidden well enough. It’s a sensible list, and most people manage it well. Then they get caught by an email. Not a racy one, usually. Not even a recent…

• WhatsApp vs Signal: Which One Actually Keeps a Married Dater’s Messages Private?

  Ask a room full of married daters which app they message on and nine of them will say WhatsApp. It’s already on the phone. Everyone’s on it. There’s a little padlock and a line about end-to-end encryption, and that feels like plenty. Then somebody mentions Signal, usually in a slightly conspiratorial tone, and the room…

• Nobody Worries About the Telly. That’s Exactly Why It Catches People Out.

  Ask anyone who’s been doing this a while what they worry about and they’ll say the phone. Face ID, a boring app name, notifications off on the lock screen, messages cleared before they walk through the door. The phone gets treated like a safe. It gets checked, tidied and second-guessed daily. And then they sit…

• 7 Apps That Will Quietly Grass You Up Six Months From Now

  Most people who date discreetly think in terms of the next twenty-four hours. Delete the messages, clear the browser, park round the corner, be home by six. And that’s sensible enough. It’s how the overwhelming majority of people manage it perfectly well for years. But phones aren’t only interested in tonight. They’re archivists. They sort,…

• You Deleted Your History. The Algorithm Didn’t.

  Ask any careful married dater about covering their tracks and they’ll recite the catechism without pausing for breath. Delete the messages. Clear the browser history. Turn off notification previews. Rename the contact. It’s the stuff of a hundred advice columns, and to be fair, most of it works. But here’s the uncomfortable bit. The riskiest…

• My Phone Kept the Hotel’s Wi-Fi Name. My Wife Found It Looking for Another Password.

  “Three weeks ago I spent an afternoon at a hotel just off the A52. Nothing went wrong. Separate cars, separate exits, home by six. Last Sunday my wife borrowed my phone at her sister’s house because hers was flat and she wanted the Wi-Fi password. She went into settings, scrolled past the saved networks, and…

• Nobody Reads the Screen Time Report. Until the One Week Somebody Does.

  She’d covered everything except the part of her phone that was keeping score Rachel from Chester had thought a great deal about her phone. Just not about the bit of it quietly totting up her week and filing a report. She’d done everything you’d expect of a careful woman four months into something. Notifications off…

• Essay: Is This Profile Real? How to Spot Fakes, Scammers and Time-Wasters on a Married Dating Site

  Graham had been on the site eleven days when the message arrived that made him feel about ten feet tall. She was thirty-eight. She was apparently in Solihull, twelve minutes from his office. And she had read his profile closely enough to ask him about the fishing. Three messages later she wanted to move to…

• Phone vs Family Laptop: Which One Is Actually More Likely to Catch You Out?

  Ask a married dater which device keeps them up at night and you’ll get the same answer every time. The phone. It’s the one that lives face-down on the kitchen worktop. The one with the passcode that quietly changed last spring. The one that somehow always needs to come into the bathroom. And fair enough.…