Sharing passwords the gold standard of trust for teen couples in digital era
Young couples have long signalled their devotion to each other by various means — the gift of a letterman jacket, or exchanging class rings or ID bracelets. Best friends share locker combinations.
The digital era has given rise to a more intimate custom. It has become fashionable for young people to express their affection for each other by sharing their passwords to email accounts, Facebook and other services. Boyfriends and girlfriends sometimes even create identical passwords and let each other read their private emails and texts.
They say they know such digital entanglements are risky, because a souring relationship can lead to people using online accounts and secrets against each other. But that, they say, is part of what makes the symbolism of the shared password so powerful.
“It’s a sign of trust,” Tiffany Carandang, a high school senior in San Francisco, said of the decision she and her boyfriend made several months ago to share passwords for email and Facebook.
“I have nothing to hide from him, and he has nothing to hide from me.”
“That is so cute,” said Cherry Ng, 16, listening in to her friend’s comments to a reporter outside school. “They really trust each other.” We do, said Carandang, 17. “I know he’d never do anything to hurt my reputation,” she added.
It doesn’t always end so well, of course. Changing a password is simple, but students, counsellors and parents say that damage is often done before a password is changed, or that the sharing of online lives can be the reason a relationship falters.
The stories of fallout include a spurned boyfriend in junior high who tries to humiliate his exgirlfriend by spreading her email secrets; tensions between significant
I’ve known plenty of couples who have shared passwords, and not a single one has not regretted it.
Sam Biddle, a columnist for the tech-news website Gizmodo
others over scouring each other’s private messages for clues of disloyalty or infidelity; or grabbing a cellphone from a former best friend, unlocking it with a password and sending threatening texts to someone else.
Rosalind Wiseman, who studies how teenagers use technology and is the author of Queen Bees and
Wannabes, a book for parents about helping girls survive adolescence, said the sharing of passwords, and the pressure to do so, is somewhat similar to sex.
Sharing passwords, she noted, feels forbidden because it is generally discouraged by adults and involves vulnerability. And there is pressure in many teenage relationships to share passwords, just as there is to have sex.
“The response is the same: If we’re in a relationship, you have to give me anything,” Wiseman said.
In a 2011 telephone survey, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 30 per cent of young people who are regularly online have shared a password with a friend, boyfriend or girlfriend. The survey, of 770 people aged 12 to 17 found that girls were almost twice as likely as boys to share. And in more than two dozen interviews, parents, students and counsellors said the practice had become widespread.
In a recent column on the tech-news website Gizmodo, Sam Biddle called password sharing a linchpin of intimacy in the 21st century and offered advice to couples and friends on how to avoid missteps.
“I’ve known plenty of couples who have shared passwords, and not a single one has not regretted it,” Bid- dle said in an interview, adding that the practice includes the unspoken notion of mutually assured destruction if somebody misbehaves.
Students say there are reasons, beyond a show of trust, to swap online keys. For instance, several college students said they regularly shared Facebook passwords — not to snoop on each other, but to force themselves to study for finals. A student would give her password to a friend to change it — and not disclose the new password — thereby temporarily locking out the Facebook account holder and taking away a big distraction to studying.
Counsellors typically advise against the practice, and parents often preach the wisdom of password privacy.
Emily Cole, 16, a high school junior in Glastonbury, Conn., felt the sting of password betrayal in seventh grade, when she gave her email password to her first boyfriend.
Then she started to develop feelings for another student, she said, and sent an email to her. Her boyfriend read the email and started spreading it around the school, calling Cole a “pervert.”
Cole said it was deeply hurtful. And yet she said she would not have reservations about sharing her password with her new boyfriend.
“I know this sounds kind of weird, but we have a different relationship,” she said. “We’re not in seventh grade. I trust him in a different way, I suppose.”
Cole’s mother, Patti, 48, a child psychologist, said she believed her daughter would be more judicious now about sharing a password. But, more broadly, she thinks young people are sometimes motivated toward such behaviour as they might be toward sex, in part because parents and others warn them against doing so.
“What worries me is we haven’t done a very good job at stopping kids from having sex,” she said. “So I’m not real confident about how much we can change this behaviour.”