Who gets passwords' custody in a breakup?

Emily Taffel didn't pull the password plug when she divorced her first husband, and she didn't cut off the boyfriend who followed. Now remarried with four stepchildren, she continues as a model of civility when it comes to exes and logins.

The 41-year-old in Coral Springs, Florida, and her first husband had subscriptions to Netflix and Hulu.

“We each paid for one of them and share. That was literally our divorce agreement,” Taffel said.

When boyfriend Sam came along but the romance ended three years later, they maintained close ties and joint custody of additional services, sharing logins among themselves and Taffel's exhusband. Taffel and her current husband have added more and shared down the line over a decade.

“I know it seems crazy,” she said. “The ex-boyfriend and the ex-husband aren't friends, but through me everybody is very amicable.”

In this era of cybersecurity concerns and calls for multifactor lockdown of all things digital, that approach points to a thorny issue when love goes wrong: What to do about the logins?

Nearly 8 in 10 Americans who are in a relationship share passwords across nearly every digital platform, said Harold Li, vice president of the encryption service ExpressVPN.

“In the digital era, sharing passwords is a sign of trust and affection akin to the gift of a letterman jacket or an exchange of school locker combinations,” he said. “It poses serious risks to your personal privacy, which even the closest of relationships need.”

And when relationships end, whether romantic or of the friendship variety, he recommends a thorough “digital divorce.”

Things don't always go swimmingly when logins aren't cut off post-breakup.

“Change the password. In the age of perpetual watch histories being widely available, nobody wants to know that their ex just watched `The Notebook' on Netflix. It stirs up all sorts of emotions,” said John Capo, an assistant professor of communications at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.