Mr. Know-It-All: Should I Let My Spouse Look at My Browser History?
Is My Browser History Fair Game for My Spouse?
Before there were browser windows, there were regular windows—ones you could see through. And one day in 1914, Florence Carman saw too much.
Florence’s husband, Edwin, a local physician on Long Island, had an office on the ground floor of their home. One of its windows faced the yard. And through it, Florence apparently spotted Edwin canoodling with a nurse. So, the story goes, she hired technicians to install a clandestine listening device in a baseboard of his examining room. A small microphone led to an ingeniously camouflaged wire, which ran upstairs to Florence’s bedroom, where a speaker was hidden in a desk drawer. Now she had a way to keep tabs on Edwin. And, in truth, nothing particularly dramatic happened. Until one evening in June when, as Edwin ushered a certain Mrs. Lulu Bailey into his office for an appointment, someone shattered the garden window, reached in with a revolver, and shot Mrs. Bailey dead.
The office became a crime scene; detectives swarmed in. Two bloodhounds sniffed the ground below the window, circling about before tearing off on a fruitless search. And yet, without anyone noticing, Florence somehow managed to rip out the listening device and stash it in the attic. “I thought it was best,” she later told police. She understood that her suspicions of her husband would bring suspicion on her, and she didn’t want to get tied up in a murder investigation.
Knowing she was snared in a tangled web of distrust, Florence had started snipping the threads. But it didn’t work. She was eventually charged with the murder. In secreting away her surveillance device, it appeared to some observers, Florence had been covering her tracks, destroying evidence of her motive.
The trial was a high-profile circus, with many sensational twists and turns, ultimately resulting in a hung jury. In a second trial, Florence was acquitted. The murder was never officially solved, leaving suspicions to fester. “I would hate to carry the burden that rests upon the shoulders of Mrs. Carman,” Lulu Bailey’s aggrieved widower told a reporter. “If she did the shooting, she will never have a happy moment in her life.”
Now, on to you. You deserve all the happy moments in the world, I can tell. So does your spouse. And fortunately, your predicament isn’t nearly as complicated: Your browser history is not fair game for your spouse. I say this because, as the very fact that you’re asking the question makes plain, you yourself do not consider it fair game. If you don’t feel comfortable with your spouse having open access to your online wanderings, then your spouse can’t claim any extrinsic, inalienable right to it. There are, inevitably, idiosyncratic lines of openness and privacy drawn through every marriage; this can be one of yours. The end. Case closed.
Except for one thing: Why? Why does your spouse feel compelled and entitled to look at your browser history, as your question implies they do, and why don’t you feel comfortable with it? Am I wrong to detect an erosion of trust in your relationship—some slippage of confidence in each other? If my suspicions are correct, then I advise you to be careful. Because such a disturbance can provoke other disturbances and further slippages, until, in an absolute worst-case scenario, a hand slips through a window and someone winds up dead.
Yours isn’t a worst-case scenario. It’s probably not even a particularly bad-case scenario. But still, it’s worth getting to the bottom of whatever caused this impasse. I’d encourage you to ask yourselves why it is that you’re asking me this question in the first place. The answer will be somewhere in your history, I’m sure. I suggest you search through it together.
This article appears in the July issue. Subscribe now.