Protecting Your Online Privacy during a Divorce

Divorce is a complex legal disentanglement from a marriage contract that involves highly personal information. While your divorce is pending, you and your spouse will need to share a significant amount of information with one another. You should, however, maintain control over what you share and how – simply allowing your soon-to-be-ex carte blanche access to your online information is often a mistake. 

Knowing how to protect your online privacy moving forward is key, and an experienced California divorce attorney can help you with that and much more.  

Why Protecting Your Online Privacy Is So Important

While protecting your online privacy is always a concern, you may be particularly vulnerable when you are going through a divorce. Securing your personal information before or during a divorce can bring considerable benefits, such as:

• Limiting your spouse’s ability to misuse your personal accounts, make harmful posts in your name, or acquire information that you would prefer to keep private.
• Limiting your spouse’s ability to collect information about you that they can proceed to twist into something personally damaging to you. 
• Ensuring that your spouse can’t engage in identity theft, which can happen in highly contentious divorces.

Protecting your privacy now can go a long way toward protecting you in the future. 

Taking Proactive Steps

There are several primary privacy-protecting steps that anyone who is going through a divorce should take early in the process. These include all the following:

• • Set up new accounts whenever possible. For example, if you share a cell phone account, which most couples do, it is a good idea to start your own. 
  • Set up a new email. Consider creating a new email account that you use specifically for your divorce.
  • Change passwords. Create new passwords for your social media accounts and change your passwords and PINs for financial accounts.
  • Tighten up privacy settings on social media accounts. Keep in mind, though, that a simple screenshot can void all your efforts – do not share anything on social media that you wouldn’t want the judge handling your case to see.
  • Protect personal devices. Consider changing your access PINs and check the security and sharing settings of your personal devices.
  • Take an app inventory. Create a list of all the apps or online accounts you use and ensure that you have your own separate accounts with your own private access info whenever possible. 
  • Set up two-step authentication for all those accounts that afford the opportunity to do so.
  • Secure medical accounts. Do not forget about your medical accounts, which you should take the time to password-protect securely.
  • Disable any automatic logins and always log out of accounts when you leave them.
  • Delete your browser history regularly. 

The more challenging you make it to access your personal, financial, medical, and legal information, the better protected your privacy will be. 

An Experienced California Divorce Attorney Is Standing By to Help

The accomplished divorce attorneys at Miranda, Magden & Miranda, LLP – proudly serving both Monterey and Salinas counties – appreciate the importance of maintaining your privacy throughout your divorce and have the focus and skill to help. We take the outcome of your case seriously, so please do not delay contacting us for more information today.