Do you feel that giving your password to another person, including a significant other, is disrespectful to the privacy of people who message you?

It depends. I give my husband plenty of my passwords but he knows he isn’t to read private messages unless I ask him to read something that isn’t too private. Just maybe private to everyone else on line but not to us. He doesn’t have facebook so some relatives will send a message through my private messages. As for the rest. He can read it all. I would never put anything on facebook that I think is alright for the whole world to see but not him.
He has access to my emails and I equally have access to his. Though most of my email accounts are to handle junk mail or for logins for sites like fluther and so on. Family and friends use our joint email.

I agree that it depends.

My husband can get into all of my accounts except for my work e-mail. I don’t worry about him seeing something private that someone else might send me because we don’t really keep things away from each other, especially if it is something going on with one of our family members or a close friend.

I never gave passwords out to boyfriends though. To me, those relationships weren’t on the same level that my marriage is and they didn’t need that information. My husband has the information now so that he can check it if I’m not able for some reason.

If you trust the other person to treat your private communication with absolute discretion, then there should be no problem. If you can’t rely on that, then do not share your password – for many reasons.

^ I do trust my boyfriend to use discretion, but I still feel like it’s disrespectful in a way. I remember when I messaged a guy and his girlfriend blew up on me, even though I didn’t do anything wrong. It made me feel violated because the message wasn’t sent to her. It was sent to him. Stuff like that makes me try to see things through the eyes of people who message me… and who may have assumed that only I would see what they sent.

It’s not just that experience either that caused me to wonder about stuff like this. One of the other things that did was that I used to be really good friends with another guy and as a result, I became friends with his then long-term girlfriend. He’d given her his passwords to his accounts he was active on. She would get angry at things people sent him that didn’t even matter anymore. Thankfully, I didn’t send him anything too embarrassing so she never really had a problem with me. But still. It weirded me out. It seemed that him trusting her with her password gave her the impression that she had the right to read his every last e-mail that he never deleted.

And then there were times when I was given passwords. I really don’t feel like I should have been given them.

I can think of more examples, but I feel like this is enough. At least for now.

I do wonder if I’d feel differently if I was married.

I am a very private and distrusting person, and so I have the tendency to be very secretive with passwords and such. No sharing.

^ I definitely understand that.

I can’t edit my previous response anymore, but I realize I made a mistake here: “It seemed that him trusting her with her password…” I meant “his password”, of course.

I have list of my most important websites/accounts in our safe, with the passwords. In case something happens to me. I do not view sharing any of this information with my partner is disrespectful to others. I trust her with my life. I know how important privacy is to her, she would never betray that trust…ever. She’s a psychologist..she’s well versed in privacy/confidentiality. And she respects it very much so. She is the only person I’d give any password to. She knows the list is in the safe but she’s never had a reason to look at it. I doubt she even remembers it’s there, forgetful as she can be. I have nothing to hide. We are very open to one another and have no reason to hide anything or distrust the other. I don’t know, we just don’t have the desire to go sifting through each other’s emails/messages, other than retrieving information we might need for something.

Anything personal that anyone shares with us, we know it is safe with us.

People who know us, personally, know we share everything. It has not stopped them from having personal conversations in our emails/messages. I tend to think that if someone has a significant other, that anything I communicate to them is open to being looked at by that other person – if it is something I don’t want that other person to know about, I certainly wouldn’t be putting it in text form.

I am very private but not dishonest and/or secretive.

^ It is good that they know. Actually, that reminds me of my oldest sister and her husband. They are both trustworthy, so I don’t really care if they see what I say to the other. Hmm.

Yes. I’ve never understood why married couples share each other’s email. To me, that is already a sign of mistrust, so why should I trust them to be discreet with my mail? If I send you an email or message, that email or message is for you alone. Not your entourage.

I have told no one that I even know what fluther is. I would never give out my password.

No. I am happy for my boyfriend to have access to all my password protected stuff (although he has never asked for it or even shown any interest in having it and he’s absolutely rubbish at remembering passwords even though one of them includes his name!!!) I make no secrets of the fact that I tell my boyfriend pretty much everything so it’s at their own risk if they do send me really personal stuff.

I readily admit that t might—might—feel differently if I had an s/o or someone else who was very close, but in general, I believe passwords belong solely to their owners.

I have only given my passwords to my husband, on accounts I feel comfortable doing so. Not fluther- lol

Kind of like medications and travelling- if one person in the world knows where you’re at and what you’re on, it’s all good.

I would be highly annoyed if I was sending personal messages to someone and they allowed anyone else to read them unless they told me in advance that they share their passwords so I could edit my messages appropriately. I send very personal emails to my best friend and I’d be extremely pissed if her boyfriend had access to them because he’s friends with my boyfriend and the things I say in confidence to her (sometimes venting about my boyfriend) would surely get back to him. Not only that, but if I wanted to tell her boyfriend/sister/mother or dog, I’d be emailing them. I talk to her about health issues I’ve had as well and if she allowed someone else access to that information, I’d probably never speak to her again. If you share your passwords and your communications are not strictly confidential, you should tell those who you correspond with up front.

No, I don’t think it’s disrespectful. Anything in writing has the chance to be viewed by others. If a friend sent a handwritten letter to me and I stored the letter in a drawer in my bedroom, my husband would have access to that letter if he really wanted to read it. The thing is, he wouldn’t unless I asked him to. The same goes for internet correspondence, imo. If you don’t want anyone else to view what you have written, you are better off making a phone call or talking in person with the one you want to share details with.

It depends on the people you are trusting. I mean I agree with you. If a friend messages you privately it should remain private. I don’t trust many people so I don’t have this issue.

@jonsblond A handwritten letter doesn’t require a password. Sharing your password to allow a third person to read correspondence not intended for their eyes by the writer is more akin to your husband using a key you gave him to unlock and read your friend’s diary without your friend’s permission. Your friend gave you the key, but didn’t give you the okay to let someone else use it. It’s a situation that requires you to have special access given to you, whereas a handwritten letter has no such security built in. You can stumble across a handwritten letter in a drawer, but you can’t stumble upon an email or private message without the password. Therein lies the difference.

If a friend told me to keep something private after reading, I would delete the message or save it in a hidden file. Otherwise I don’t feel that anyhting needs to be kept from my husband, it’s just not important to me, but he is.

@KNOWITALL That’s probably a good way of dealing with it. I don’t think keeping a friend’s private information private constitutes keeping something from someone else. For something to qualify as being “kept from” someone, the information would have to be something that concerned that third person in some way. My boyfriend is very important to me, but not more important than my friend’s right to privacy in matters that don’t concern or have any relation to my boyfriend at all.

My husband and I learned a long time ago that sometimes friendships interfere in the marriage so we adjusted relationships accordingly, and openly with our friends.

We also made some rules (for us alone) like we don’t go to bars unless we’re together, just different things that have helped us keep our relationship from the more common pitfalls.

@diavolobella I’ve stumbled upon an open email when sharing a computer. It happens.

@jonsblond I’m sure it happens by accident, but it’s less likely than leaving something tangible lying around.

@diavolobella I’m just giving my opinion. I still feel that if you don’t want anyone to read what you have written, don’t write it. Anything written has the possibility to be viewed by others.

@jonsblond I understand that. I just know that, for instance, if my best friend had shared emails I wrote to her about my private thoughts, feelings and fears that I shared only with her when I had cancer, I would have been absolutely devastated. Accidentally sharing that would have been forgivable, but knowingly giving someone else access to that information without telling me would not have been. The OP wasn’t talking about accidental views, but about intentionally sharing passwords.

@diavolobella Intentionally sharing passwords does not mean the password will be used.

@jonsblond That may be true, but if the password is shared, I think people should be told that so they can edit their messages accordingly. I think the assumption is that emails and private messages are private. If they aren’t, the person sharing the passwords should tell you upfront so you can govern yourself accordingly. Kind of like “this call may be monitored for quality assurance.” LOL

^ I agree with @diavolobella that people should be informed that their private messages may be accessed by someone else if that is indeed true. It just seems like the respectful thing to do to me.

Developing a habit of sharing passwords can open a can of worms.