Category: Online safety and privacy

• 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.…

• Essay: How Do Affairs Actually Get Discovered? Every Way People Really Get Caught — and Why the Careful Ones Aren’t

  When Martin’s wife found out, it wasn’t the phone. He’d been meticulous about the phone. It was the supermarket loyalty card — points earned at a petrol station forty miles from anywhere he had any business being, on a Tuesday he’d claimed to be in the office. She wasn’t even looking. The app sent her…

• “The AirPods Read My Message Out Loud”: Three Members on the Close Call That Changed Everything

  Ask any experienced married dater about their worst moment and they won’t describe an argument or an awkward goodbye. They’ll describe a few seconds of pure, cold silence — the moment they thought it was all about to come out. Because nearly everyone doing this carefully has had one. The close call. The near miss…

• Your Own Front Door Just Became the Snitch: What a Smart Doorbell Really Remembers

  “But it’s my camera” People worry about their phones. They worry about texts, about browser history, about a rogue notification lighting up the lock screen at exactly the wrong moment. What far fewer married daters worry about is the small plastic box screwed to the front of their own house — the one they installed…