Cheater Checker – spying on your loved ones

The effects of new and improved communication technologies on society are clearly profound, though we’re aware of very little research being done into what those changes are. What began as a reader request to cover a software program earlier this week unearthed the clear signs that infidelity is on the rise due to the information revolution. With the advent of technology, cheating has become easier to facilitate. Dating sites, online social networks and instant messaging make it extremely easy to start communicating with people you would never otherwise meet. Anyway, by the end of the story, your humble scribe felt very naïve. For starters, Cheaterchecker is in Version 4.2 and we didn’t even know it existed. It’s a software package that, once you’ve installed it on your computer, enables you to spy on anyone else using that computer and keeps track of everything from emails to web pages visited and even instant messaging. As the name implies, Cheater Checker is designed to catch a cheating spouse or partner. It’s only legal to install it on your computer – doing it to someone else’s computer is illegal but we suspect that’s how it’s being used. What caught our eye was what appeared to be some poetic license with the facts in the promotional video – 1 in 2 people in a relationship cheat on their partner, 57% of women cheat on their partner, 3 out of 4 married men cheat on their wives, 2 out of 3 people being cheated on never find out ... so we asked for their sources and they provided them.

CheaterChecker’s Manny Coats responded with the following:

“With the advent of technology, cheating has become easier to facilitate. Dating sites, online social networks and IM'ers make it extremely easy to start communicating with people you would never otherwise meet. These online conversations can lead to real life meetings and cheating.

“Another thing to consider is that people seem to step outside of themselves when communicating over the computer, i.e, they are typically more upfront or bold than they would ever be in real life.

“A shy person can communicate or chat with dozens of people online in a given night, but that same person might not ever approach a single person out in the real world - at a bar, for example.

Sue Shellenberger, work & family columnist for the Wall Street Journal, has just written a new book about the "female midlife crisis," called The Breaking Point. Shellenberger's book cites a 3,000-person study from the National Opinion Research Center in 2002 suggesting that the overall rate of extramarital cheating for women is rising rapidly.

About 60 percent of men and 40 percent of women will have an affair at some point in some marriage - Author "Monogamy Myth", Therapist Peggy Vaugn

Married men probably still stray more often than married women-perhaps from 50 percent to 65 percent by the age of forty." According to Maggie Scarf, author of Intimate Partners

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