Separating your digital life
Shared logins outlast shared addresses. What to separate, the order to do it in, and why locking everything down quickly is the wrong first move for some people.
Two people who live together end up sharing far more than a home. Passwords, an Apple ID or Google account, location, photos, a phone plan, a thermostat, a password manager, a dozen subscriptions nobody remembers signing up for.
Almost all of it survives the move-out, invisibly, because nothing forces you to deal with it.
Start here, before you change anything
There are two very different situations, and the advice is nearly opposite.
If there is any chance you are being monitored, or you do not feel safe, do not start changing things yet. Losing access is something a controlling person notices, and advocates who work on this every day are clear that abrupt lockouts can escalate the situation rather than end it. The safest sequence is to talk to a domestic violence advocate first and plan the timing, not to secure everything tonight.
If that is your situation, a few practical notes matter more than the checklist below. Use a device they have not had access to, such as a friend's phone, a work computer, or one at a library. Assume anything typed on a monitored device is visible, including your searches and this page. And reset passwords from the unmonitored device, not the one you are worried about.
The safety resources page has the hotline numbers, which are free, confidential, and available at any hour.
If safety is not a concern, the rest of this is a practical list, and none of it is urgent in the same way. Work through it at a reasonable pace.
Do your email first
This is the one piece of order that genuinely matters.
Almost every other account you own can be taken over by whoever controls your email, because that is where password resets arrive. Securing your bank login means very little if your spouse can reset it from an inbox they can still reach.
So: your personal email account first, with a new password and two-factor authentication turned on. Then everything else.
While you are in there, check the recovery settings, which almost nobody thinks to look at. A recovery phone number or backup email still pointing at your spouse is a permanent side door, and it survives every password change you make.
Then work down the list
Your passwords generally. New ones, different for each account, ideally in a password manager under your own account. If you share a password manager vault, you need your own, not a copy of the shared one.
Your Apple ID or Google account. If you have been sharing one, it is not really an account so much as a merged life: photos, messages, backups, location, purchase history, and browser data. Separating these takes real effort and is worth starting early, because the untangling is slower than it looks.
Location sharing. Find My, Google location sharing, Life360, and anything similar. Also check family-sharing groups, which quietly re-enable things you thought you had turned off.
Devices you have forgotten. The old iPad, the shared laptop, a previous phone still signed in, the tablet in the kitchen. Any device still logged into your accounts is your accounts. Sign out remotely where you can, and factory reset anything being handed over.
Smart home things. Cameras, video doorbells, thermostats, voice assistants, smart locks, the car app. These often keep working for whoever set them up, from anywhere, indefinitely. Connected car apps in particular show location and are almost never on anyone's list.
Your phone plan. If your spouse is the account holder, they can typically see your call and message logs, not the contents but the pattern of who and when. It is a partial record in both directions: only calls and texts carried over the cell network appear, so messages sent over Wi-Fi or data, iMessage among them, are not in the log at all. Assume the cellular pattern is visible, and do not read an empty log as proof that nothing happened. Getting your own line takes an afternoon and closes a window most people do not know is open.
Shared cloud storage. Set up a new account for divorce documents specifically, separate from any family-linked storage. Keeping legal paperwork in the family Dropbox is a mistake that is obvious only afterwards.
Subscriptions and memberships. Streaming, music, gym, storage unit, food delivery, the annual thing that renews in March. These carry two costs: money leaking from a shared card for years, and viewing or order history that is more revealing than people expect.
The ones people miss
- Recovery phone and backup email, mentioned above and worth repeating because it undoes everything else
- Recovery and legacy contacts on your Apple account; recovery phone, recovery email, and Inactive Account Manager on Google
- Browser sync, which shares history, bookmarks, and saved passwords across signed-in devices
- Saved payment methods in shared accounts and app stores
- Loyalty and travel accounts with shared logins
- Two-factor codes still going to a shared phone number
One line not to cross
Everything above is about your own accounts and your own access. It does not extend to theirs.
Logging into your spouse's private accounts, reading their messages, or installing anything on their devices can be a crime in its own right, entirely separate from the divorce, and it hands the other side a genuinely damaging story about you. Do not count on it being excluded, either. The federal suppression rule covers intercepted calls and messages, not ones sitting stored in an account, so material taken this way often does come in. What it reliably costs you is your credibility and, potentially, a criminal charge. If you believe something important exists that you cannot legitimately reach, tell your attorney it exists. That is what formal discovery is for. Be realistic about where it comes from, though: a subpoena to a phone carrier or an app company will not produce the contents of your spouse's messages, and many of those companies keep the contents briefly or not at all. Messages come from your spouse, through discovery. What the companies can be asked for is records of who contacted whom and when. What can and cannot be used as evidence covers the difference.
If any part of this raises a safety concern rather than an administrative one, that is the more important thing, and it is worth talking to an advocate before making changes. The safety resources page lists who to call.