My parents still can’t understand why I have set up guest account on my computer that I nuke every time someone has used it. It took years for me convince them to make separate accounts for our shared computer(they still use their shared acoount without password and won’t let me make them an account that is not admin. ugh). They also think if I close my monitor when I have my email open I have something to hide, but won’t even let me on the same room as them if they open a letter. I just hate that.

I share the same peculiarities; She doesn’t know mine, I know (at least a few of) hers. Though I won’t use them without asking permission each and every time.

Nor have I a problem of lending access to any of my accounts / computers – but I won’t share the passwords. This isn’t about not trusting, it is about … trust. :)

I’ve always been paranoid enough to keep my hard drives encrypted, and until recently i just used long pass phrases (~20-30 characters) to unlock them. Now i’ve gotten into using even more complex keys, but i keep them on a USB stick or SD Card, and have a grub boot option to boot using a USB key. I have a seperate (physical) key for each computer, and my SO is aware of their location and how to use them if needed (and to not do so for any authroities.). She also knows my login password on one machine so she can log in to play games i have installed with wine.

For the most part in regards to actual passwords, I don’t have much reason to keep them from my SO (or her from me), but we don’t really have any interest in snooping, and we use seperate computers for pretty much everything except gaming and watching movies.

I know my girlfriends password as I made it for her. (It used to be ‘azerty’, go figure.)
She doesn’t know mine though.

Now that I think of it, it’s kind of weird that I can breach her privacy, but she can’t breach mine.

My wife has all my passwords, and I have all hers. It is partially for convenience – account sharing and whatnot. But also, it is for honesty reasons. Mistrust undermines relationships, and secrets can give reason for mistrust. I would never share any of my passwords with anyone else. I would never ask anyone else for their password.

I was taught to value personal privacy of others. In my family everyone had their personal space, and going through someones desk drawers was almost unthinkable. You did not open other family members personal letters, you did not read their diaries, you don’t go snooping in their personal belongings… I just extend this notion to the electronic realm. Because let’s face it – no one writes letters long hand anymore, no one keeps a dead tree diary and no one keeps hard copies of embarrassing shit.

Hmm. Interesting. I grew up in a culture that has no conception of “personal privacy.” I’m already in my mid-twenties, and my mom still reads my letters if I leave them lying on the desk. (Yes, when she comes over as a guest in my house.) I think she would read my diary if it were available to her. That said, I was quite glad when stuff became digitized, and my mother, bless her heart, did not bother to learn how to use a computer. But, I’ve digressed…

As a personal principle, I don’t share my passwords or computers with other people. I used to work in IT at a large organization, and I would often have to bring my work home. I had to use VPN a lot, and I was quite conscious not to leave an open trail, etc. However, there were times during my cohabitation with my so-called partner/porcupine when it was easier to give my partner the password to wake my laptop from sleep than to get out of bed, go to the other room, and get the other laptop, or ask him to switch user accounts, etc. (Yes, I was beyond lazy, but that’s hardly the point.)

I think whether you share your password with your partner is entirely your business. I also think it reflects the personalities of the individuals involved. Some couples are very individualist; they believe that even though they’re together, they should do things separately. Some couples are extremely interdependent, and they share almost everything. Many of us are somewhere in between… A good example for comparison, perhaps, is joint bank accounts or credit cards. Do you establish a joint bank account because you “have nothing to hide”? Because it’s “convenient”? Because it shows “trust”?

I definitely think you can’t expect, or demand, your partner to share anything with you. Trust is not a right; it’s a privilege. If you haven’t shown yourself to be good with managing money, I will never establish a joint bank account with you. The “you have nothing to hide” excuse just doesn’t make sense to me, I guess.

On the other hand, I’m also not much of a “separatist” when it comes to common relationship “properties.” I think you shouldn’t be too paranoid with your significant others when it comes to passwords if they are generally responsible, and if sharing such passwords do not put you at risk of significant loss. At some point, you have to trust them with some things. The key is, does it make sense to share that information with them? My partner doesn’t need access to my work account, or my e-mail, or my bank, but sometimes, he should be able to use the computer to look up a YouTube video or a dinner recipe. I trust that while he’s on my computer looking at YouTube videos, he’s not also searching for that sensitive file on whatever.

So, in short, I have nothing against password sharing as long as the people involved are fully aware of what they’re doing, and if sharing the intended password does not lead to a cascade of other unintended consequences.

Nope.
I don’t share passwords with my wife or with anyone.
All of my passwords (a different one for each account) are stored in a GPG-encrypted file, and my GPG passphrase is within epsilon of weird, insane, and anal-retentive.
As some others, we each have our own computers and they are hands-off to the other.

We view privacy as a primary extension of our individual and personal property rights.

i know my girlfriend’s passwords… even changed them for her so they are a little more secure. (can you believe one of them was 3 numbers? -_-).

there is no way i would give mine out to anyone though. she recently needed to log into my computer to do something while i was at work. i just remotely logged in for her. even having multiple passwords, i think it’s the job im in, plus the fact im a nerd that i will never give my passwords out to anyone.

i saw a document a while back that included all important information if you were to die, and passwords for a lot of important sites (banking, stocks, even personal mail) were included in there. i’ve been meaning to fill this out for a while and put it in a safety deposit box only to be opened once i’ve died (which i hope wont be for some time.. im only 25 XP).

i guess all im trying to say is only way someone is going to get my passwords is over my dead body.

My wife and I know eachothers’ passwords and we wouldn’t mind if we opened eachothers’ snail-mail, either. Certain behaviors are obvious violations of trust (e.g. reading personal e-mails without permission) but you can’t really keep secrets from someone you share a bed/life/family with. Maybe that’s naive… I haven’t been married that long. But if I didn’t trust her with my password I also wouldn’t trust her with my future/kids/finances/etc. Just because I know her password doesn’t mean I abuse that trust.

I don’t share any of my passwords in general, even with my wife. We each have our own computer, our own email, etc, so I don’t see any reason why we need to go on each others. Just the same as I don’t go through her phone or letters addressed to her.