Location: Indiana
I will keep this brief. My partner (23) and I (23) are temporarily staying with her parents as we renovate our home, so we have been sharing a space with her younger sister (20). The sister just started going to community college last fall, and started using my partner’s MacBook, as she had broken her own laptop previously. My partner didn’t mind this, she just figured she’d ask for it back when we moved out.
Yesterday, we had been informed by a mutual friend that the sister had been logging into my partner’s account and reading our text messages to each other, as well as showing them to her school friends. We don’t know how she knows the login information, nor that the MacBook was still linked to my partner’s iCloud. Obviously, this is a huge invasion of privacy on its face. We were also told that the sister was specifically looking for “sexting” type messages and showing those to her friends. I knew this was not a lie, as my friend had recited a text to me that I sent to my partner just last week.
When we had gotten home, my partner simply asked for the laptop back, and additionally told her to “never use it again”. Her response to this gave us all the confirmation we needed, she immediately got in her car and drove away. I received a call from my friend, telling me that the sister had called him crying and berating him for ratting her out.
We feel incredibly violated, and have no idea how to handle this beyond keeping the laptop away from her in future. Should legal action be taken? Is this even legal to begin with?
Edit: I do not wish to get some sort of “revenge”, I’m just at a loss, and genuinely didn’t know the legality of the situation. Thank you for the clarification.
Comments
It doesn’t seem appropriate, but if you really want to file a police report, you could. I very much doubt they’ll act on it or there’s any crime here, though; she didn’t hack into the computer, she was given access. Your partner should have secured her accounts and personal cloud information/data.
Your partner should, as they have done, take their laptop back. Out of an abundance of caution it’s probably also worth resetting their iCloud password and reviewing the devices enrolled in it, to make sure that their sister didn’t leave anything new logged into it.
If the sister actually found and distributed intimate images or video, then she may have committed a crime. Your partner can make a police report. So can you, if it was images of you.
In principle she committed a crime by gaining unauthorized access, but given the real prospect that all she did was open an app your partner left logged in, and the lack of any other public harm, it’s likely that this element, on its own, would be treated like a family squabble by the police, and not investigated further now that the problem is more or less solved at the interpersonal level.
Sharing nudes of someone else to a third party, even if they voluntarily given to you originally, without prior consent, is a felony in many states. Although they are called “revenge porn” laws because they often were motivated by domestic violence and blackmail situations, they do apply here too. I would make sure she knows that she Fd up, you don’t trust her, you’re very angry with her, and that she could end up in prison if she doesn’t get her 💩together.
https://www.indyjustice.com/blog/criminal-defense/revenge-porn-in-indiana/
ETA – in Indiana it looks like a misdemeanor unless she has priors.