additional services, sharing logins and the cost
to this day among themselves and Tafel’s ex-
husband. Tafel and her current husband have
added more and shared down the line over a
decade after her irst marriage ended.
“I know it seems crazy,” she said. “The ex-
boyfriend and the ex-husband aren’t friends, but
through me everybody is very amicable.”
In this era of cybersecurity concerns and calls for
multifactor lockdown of all things digital, that
approach points to a thorny issue when love
goes wrong: What to do about the logins?
Nearly 8 in 10 Americans who are in a
relationship share passwords across nearly every
digital platform, ranging from social media to
email and cell phone to mobile wallets, said
Harold Li, vice president of the encryption
service ExpressVPN.
“In the digital era, sharing passwords is a
sign of trust and afection akin to the gift of a
letterman jacket or an exchange of school locker
combinations,” he said. “However, while it may
seem like a romantic gesture at the moment,
it poses serious risks to your personal privacy,
which even the closest of relationships need.”
And when relationships end, whether romantic
or of the friendship variety, he recommends a
thorough “digital divorce.”
Sisi Cronin, 33, in Napa, California, is still logged
in to her college boyfriend’s Netlix account,
with her own proile. While they don’t live near
each other, they remain friendly after going their
separate ways when she was 23.
“One time about three years ago he sent me a
kind of funny message saying, hey, Netlix has