I accidentally snooped. Am I a bad person?

By accident or design, it's easier than ever to invade someone else's privacy. The question is whether we allow our worst instincts to drive what we do next

I once accidentally read a message about me, not to me, in a Facebook messages thread on a friend's iMac screen. This message about me, not to me, led to a drunken debate outside a bar that descended into a brief street brawl between a member of the Facebook thread and a stranger who came to my defence. Yes, it went to court.

Sitting in the witness room opposite a very nice police officer, the thought did cross my mind: I probably should have clicked and minimised that Facebook window when I saw the messages.

This was six years ago and you'd think I'd have learned not to accidentally snoop by now. And yet there I was, scrolling through Spotify on my sofa couch, snooping. I had just typed “On r” into the search bar and physically jumped back from my phones, eyes wide. Two On Repeats. Two purple infinity icons. Two sets of “songs you love right now”. One of them was mine: Junie Morrison, Chihei Hatakeyama, respectable. The other belonged to someone named Luke. Michael Jackson, The Weeknd, Harry Styles. I smirked, I judged, I screenshotted. I was thrilled. I was seeing something I was not supposed to be seeing.

This is not, as it turns out, an unusual occurrence. In 2010 and again in 2013, Facebook accidentally made some users' private messages briefly public. In 2018, an Amazon Echo sent a recording of a conversation to a couple's friend, and Twitch mixed up some private messages in its archive feature. The list goes on. It's not an everyday security bug but it could happen. You're minding your own business, practising perfect online hygiene – and then you're hit square in the face with a stranger's private life.

One night in mid-May, Cherrie woke up at 2am, in her bedroom in North Carolina. She thought she heard her two-year-old crying through the security camera system. She checked on her daughter, clicked back to the homescreen and hit cancel on a “do you trust this account?” pop-up. "Then all of a sudden I saw someone else's cameras. I was confused so I clicked the backyard to see if maybe our camera had fallen off. Then when I clicked a bit more I realised it was a totally different home."

Cherrie was one of 712 Eufy users who were temporarily shown other people's live home security feeds, and given access to recordings, instead of their own. She took two screenshots to prove it to her husband Mitch, who was sleeping, as she didn't think he'd believe her. Did she have a look around first, though? "Part of me was curious as to how I could see someone else's feed so I clicked two of their outdoor cameras," she says. "I also looked at the timestamp to see if we were viewing a neighbour's home. I specifically didn't click the camera called "bedroom" as I don't want to know what's going on in there."

Of course, the more likely scenario is that you glance at a private message on a phones lockscreen, or you're sent a nude photo you didn't ask for in a group chat. Earlier this year, Sam was cooking at her boyfriend's house in York, looking at a recipe online on his laptop. A Facebook Messenger notification popped up: "I'm so horny, I wish you were here right now." Her heart started beating nineteen to the dozen, she says. "I was tempted to click on it but I was scared of what I might read. He came back about two minutes later but I was so tempted to go through his phones after that. I didn't and he still doesn't know I saw that message."

Cherrie and Sam are much better people than me. To find out how much better, I asked a moral philosopher. "One of the unfortunate characteristics of morality is moral disengagement," says Katleen Gabriels, an assistant professor at Maastricht University. "So if many people are doing the same thing, such as forwarding nude pictures of celebrities as entertainment, they don't feel responsible anymore. And with people who are far away, who we don't know, we tend to feel less empathetic."

She thinks victim blaming – the subject shouldn't have been so stupid to let this happen – and the habit of filming strangers, without their consent, for viral social media footage aren't helping with disengagement, either. What should you do if you unwittingly invade someone's privacy? Don't share it, and notify the company if it's a glitch.

So you're not a bad person if you find yourself in front of a private thread or feed and then do the right thing. I am, though. Although, as it turns out, I wasn't even a Spotify snooper. After a few minutes on Google, I realised I hadn’t stumbled through a secret door onto a stranger's digital bookcase. I was looking at a playlist that this undiscovered tastemaker had chosen to make public. So the guffawing from me and my equally snobby friends at his music taste wasn't actually immoral. Just a bit mean. 

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This article was originally published by WIRED UK