Ready to share your password with your bae? Read these safety tips first

Is your latest love match the world’s next Tinder swindler? It’s a tough question to answer. A survey found 43% of couples in committed relationships feel pressured to share their passwords and live locations with their partners.

While every intimate relationship can benefit from sharing private information for safety reasons, it can also put you in jeopardy if you are too quick or naive with your personal data. Scammers, hackers and crackers aren’t only looking to old ways of stealing information and continue to find new invasive methods that could leave you broke and brokenhearted. Here are some of the latest scams you should watch out for.

THIS LITTLE PIGGY WAS SCAMMED

Pig butchering scams have become a popular way to lower your guard and strike once the scammers have all the information they need. Much like a pig being fattened up for slaughter, the new con sees swindlers playing innocent with seemingly innocent scams (digital meet cutes, if you will) that progress into charming texts that seduce you. The scam is designed to win you over with time.

“The signs of such scams are often overly romantic gestures that are too much, too soon, excessive financial advice or asking for cryptocurrency investments,” said Anna Collard, SVP content strategy and evangelist at KnowBe4 Africa.

“They use love-bombing to foster romantic rapport and then pretend to invest their own money in your name to show how much they care about you, only to swindle you later.”

Collard suggests having a circle of people you trust who can be your soundboard when experiencing these kinds of criminals so you can “avoid falling victim to your own emotions” as cybercriminals can isolate you.

OVERSHARING IS NOT CARING

Collard warned couples face a barrage of cybersecurity risks, specially when sharing digital spaces and devices. Unintentional data leaks can occur when partners use weak passwords on their cloud storage that are exploited, or they share too much data online about their partners, such as location or activity data, and overshare on social media. Shared devices are particularly risky because of the potential for one partner to download malicious software.

CAN WE SHARE PASSWORDS?

Collard recommended couples should maintain digital safety through five steps.

1. Do not to share accounts, but rather set up individual profiles for each person. 
2. Do not use the same password for many accounts. If you must share a password, rather use a reputable password manager which offers secure password sharing or digital vault services.
3. Couples should set up shared recovery emails to ensure both partners know critical account details.
4. If you’re the tech-savvy one in the relationship, teach and don’t control. Your role should be to encourage mutual learning without making one partner feel dependent.
5. Divide responsibilities. The tech-savvy partner can handle set-up while both should be responsible for maintenance and monitoring.

Collard said couples should learn to keep communicating about cybersecurity in their relationship.

“It shouldn’t be taboo. Make cybersecurity a topic of conversation and discuss any online interactions or suspicious activities openly.”