Regardless of how much you and your partner trust each other, there’s a general understanding that everyone is entitled to their privacy, especially when it comes to our phones. You may not have anything to hide on yours, you don’t exactly want the person you’re dating going through your texts or photostream… or do you? Apparently more and more couples are giving each other fingerprint access (or touch access) to their phones and I’m not sure how I feel about it.
- Biometric recognition is a bit intense. Technology has moved on from traditional passwords and onto fingerprint access and even facial recognition. I don’t even fully trust it myself and it’s my phone —letting my boyfriend also have an all-access pass to the little device that pretty much holds all the details of my life is a bit scary.
- The reasons for doing this seem a bit weak… According to CNBC, a lot of couples claim that giving your S.O. access to your phone is for innocent reasons like being able to change a song that’s playing or checking incoming notifications. Sorry, but both of those things can be done from the lock screen—homeboy doesn’t need to unlock my phone to do that.
- Apparently some people want to share these details. I’m not sure who these people are, but I guess they exist and that their reasoning kind of makes sense. As 24-year-old Emma Clarke explained, “I think that inherently, people desire to share themselves and to be known. Sharing your phone fingerprints demonstrates trust between two people, and that you are OK with being known by that person, and that they’re OK with you knowing them too.” I mean, I guess…
- It’s apparently “like putting your boyfriend in your top friends on MySpace.” This according to Clarke, who is probably too young to even remember MySpace, let alone the fact that the feature was actually called Top 8. In any case, I feel like this comparison is totally invalid—publicly declaring that you value someone by putting them as a priority friend on your social media profile is totally different to giving your partner access to everything on your phone. That’s a no from me, dawg.
- Even experts agree that this probably isn’t that great of an idea. According to sex and relationship expert Tammy Nelson, couples who want to do this need to be careful since you can easily change passwords but biometric data is a little more complicated. “It’s a little bit of the naivete that, this is going to last forever, nothing is ever going to go wrong, we’re always going to respect each other’s space,” she said. “What you think is private and secret, the other person probably has a much different idea, but you assume you mean the same thing, and that’s the beginning of the betrayal.”
- At the end of the day, it’s unnecessary and meaningless. If my boyfriend needs biometric access to my phone to feel like he can trust me or feel certain that I trust him then there’s already a problem. I prefer to show my trust in more meaningful ways, thanks.
