The secret history of the browser cache

Posted on 05/07/2017 0 CommentPosted by Christine Hogan in Family Life

 Modern manners:  Should you let your partner look at your browser history? Jon Madellem considers this thorny question for Wired.

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.

Full story here on Wired.

Photo by Thomas Kelley on Unsplash