Privacy may be a myth in the Meta age—it’s surely been dubbed toxic in romantic relationships. If someone refuses to share their phone password with their partner, it might be a red flag: They’re hiding something. At least that’s what I hear from Gen Z boyfriends and girlfriends. They seem to like watching—and being watched—in the name of love. The way modern lovers track each other’s locations at all times, Apple should rename its Find My Phone feature to Find My Co-dependent.
It’s fascinating how a generation that insists on independence also suffers from the crippling anxiety of not having full access to their partner. I wish I were joking, but I have seen couples logged into the same Zomato app so they can watch what each of them eats. God forbid a midnight order of a burger and fries is placed, the caring partner immediately calls, “I thought we decided to eat healthy?” It’s pathetic, if you ask me.
Tatum Hunter wrote about the phenomenon in The Guardian and called it ‘the age of interpersonal surveillance’, which is a polite way of saying we’ve normalised keeping tabs on people we claim to trust. “Perhaps the clearest examples of eroding privacy norms come from romantic partnerships, where tracking and monitoring have become widely accepted for direct communication.” Of course, no one calls it surveillance. It’s all about transparency, trust, and caring for one another by not leaving the other out of sight at any given moment. It’s not enough that Brother Mark knows everything about us, and so hundreds and thousands of brands are pushing to sell exactly what we merely thought about buying.
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Transparency or trust?
Don’t get me wrong, I find it very cute when my friend’s boyfriend sends me unhinged selfies of her—taken, of course, without her knowledge. He knows her password, so he can co-DJ parties off her banger playlists like some sort of romantic Spotify collaborator. They track each other’s location too, the wholesome version—he knows when she’s reached home safe, even when she forgets to inform him. Whether it’s Delhi, Mumbai, Pune or Ratlam—girls everywhere benefit from it.
But then, as it does, there was a small trouble in paradise. She decided to quit smoking, and he—like a committed partner or an overenthusiastic rehab facility—volunteered to support. The problem is, mortals cheat. So now she finds herself frantically tracking his location instead. The moment he gets within a 200-metre radius of her house, she’s sprinting around like a criminal mastermind, burying burnt butts, airing out rooms, and chewing mints. Hectic.
She can’t complain because she initiated this endeavour of transparency. At first, somewhere between the honeymoon phase and long-term commitment bliss, she wanted to know what DMs he was fielding on his Instagram. So, she asked him for his password, and like any other trustworthy new-age boyfriend, he gave it to her. She swore that she would never go through his personal chats because she “trusts” him, but the whole friend group chat knows that’s something she does regularly, randomly, resentfully. What’s worse is that she feels utter embarrassment after going through his chats with any and every girl because every time she realises she’s the red flag for snooping like that.
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Tech-enabled dating
Most people who advocate for password sharing insist it isn’t about surveillance, but about being “open” and “loyal”—as if transparency were the same thing as trust. On this side of the dating echo chamber, autonomy is suspicious or sus, as the kids call it these days. Men make reels announcing that once they’re serious about a girl, they don’t just hand over their passwords—they go a step further and register her face for biometric access. Girls love hearing it. Tech-enabled dating lives feel safer with this kind of enmeshment. Our phones are our lives, and—according to some monogamists—it doesn’t make sense not to share with someone you claim to love.
I, too, have felt very, very special when a guy just dictated his phone’s passcode. It’s a different thing that I never cared enough to remember, but it does feel good to be given the keys to something so central to a person’s life—like being handed VIP access. But to use it would mean that I would also have to share my phone’s passcode. I don’t know about you guys, but my 3 am Google search history is not adorable for even my 10 am self—let alone a man I’m still deciding whether I like.
By the popular over-sharing logic, a couple becomes one entity, not technically, but technologically. And does that really bring us closer to each other? Not really. Even two-step authentication isn’t fool-proof like that. A Pune-based C-suite’s boyfriend of two years knocked her socks off—she discovered that he was secretly married for the last four months. His location was always on. It still didn’t give him away. Tech transparency doesn’t stand for anything real.
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(Edited by Theres Sudeep)