Protecting Digital Privacy During a High Value Divorce

A settlement can take months to negotiate. The house, the trust, the art collection, all of it valued down to the last piece. What is rarely considered is the digital life two people built together, and it can go unnoticed for months after everything else has been divided.

The digital side of a separation is easy to miss, simply because there is rarely an obvious point in the process where anyone thinks to raise it. A couple can spend years accumulating accounts, devices and permissions without either of them keeping track, and it may not become urgent until the relationship that held it together is over.

What gets left behind

A family cloud account holding years of photographs and documents. Smart home system, doorbells and cameras included, possibly controlled from a single app that nobody has reviewed in years. Location sharing switched on for a good reason once and then forgotten. Joint calendars. A shared email address for household admin. Financial apps with saved cards and a full payment history. Years of tagged social posts recording where one person was and who they were with.

There are also things that are easier to overlook because they are not really accounts, like a car with a connected app that keeps a record of every journey.

Why it matters

Depending on how amicable the separation was, a former partner retaining access to any of this can be dangerous as well as intrusive, since it can mean someone continuing to see where you are, who you are with and what is happening in your household, months after the marriage ended. Where there is a public profile, or children whose privacy now matters more than ever, that is not something to leave to the assumption that somebody has already dealt with it.

When to raise it

For advisors, this is often easier to spot than to bring up. Yet by the time a settlement is being finalised, you will know more about the client's household, their assets and their arrangements than almost anyone else involved in the case, which places you better than anyone to recognise that it needs addressing.

The timing of that conversation is important, because it can fail in either direction. Raised too early, before anything is settled, it can feel premature or even provocative, and there is little to act on in any case, since nobody yet knows which house, which car and which devices belong to whom. Raised too late, after both parties have moved into new homes and new routines, the access may already have been used, whether deliberately or not, and the shared arrangement will have been dismantled piecemeal by whichever party reached each element first, so whatever remains is harder to locate.

The window sits once terms are largely agreed but before either party has moved out, when ownership is settled enough for the work to be handled as administration rather than argument and everything is still in one place to be found in a single pass.

If you are the one going through the separation, don’t hesitate to flag it with your advisors.

What's involved in digital separation

Properly separating a digital life is a long way from resetting a few passwords, since every shared account has to be found and reviewed, and memory is not a reliable way to do that. Access then has to be revoked outright, because changing a password does not necessarily sign out a device that is already logged in.

Smart home and location permissions are among the most commonly missed, so they are checked specifically, as are old devices, vehicles and trackers. Even a shared music account can reveal what you listen to and where you were when you played it.

You are not expected to know what to look for, since very few people could audit their own home network and there is no reason they should have to. Done properly, you come out of it with a digital life that belongs to you alone, and no access left in anyone else's hands.

Our approach

We work through all of it with the client, so nothing is left for them to manage on their own during what is already a difficult period. The advisor's role is to know the issue exists and to raise it at the right moment, at which point it can be the difference between a clean break and a separation that is legally complete but not actually finished.

Get in touch with coc00n to find out more.