Changing the locks is no longer the same thing as changing the access.
In this episode, Karen McMahon sits down with Jonathan Steele, a Chicago based family law attorney and certified cybersecurity professional, for a conversation Journey Beyond Divorce has never had in over 425 episodes. Jonathan has spent more than a decade litigating high conflict, high net worth cases, and he brings a layer of technical expertise that most family lawyers simply do not have.
Karen opens with the uncomfortable truth that almost nobody going through divorce thinks of themselves as a cybersecurity target. Jonathan walks listeners through what a spouse may still be able to see long after someone has moved out: the Ring camera, the Nest footage, the Gmail account still signed in on an old iPad, the shared iCloud photo album, the luxury car app that logs where the car has been and how fast it was going, the location sharing nobody remembers turning on. He explains why the smart devices that were supposed to make life easier, the robot vacuum, the smart refrigerator, the video doorbell, are often running years old software while sitting on the same Wi-Fi network as every device that holds something sensitive. The front door may have an excellent lock on it. The window screen is full of holes.
When Karen asks when in the process people should start addressing this, his answer is immediate. Before you file. Before discovery. Before trial. As soon as you possibly can.
Then the conversation gets closer to home. Jonathan describes how children become tracker beacons without anyone intending it, how a single mutual friend inside a list of eight hundred followers can hand a spouse the photograph that ends spousal support, and how one of his own cases terminated a maintenance obligation of more than a million dollars a year because a woman's adult children were quietly feeding her social media posts to their father. She was simply living her life and posting about it, the way everyone does.
He also answers a question a growing number of listeners are asking. Conversations with AI about a divorce are discoverable, and lawyers have already started requesting the logs.
Karen asks him to triage the overwhelm into a short list, and he does. Move sensitive communication to a more secure messenger. Open a brand new email address. Run the Safety Check tool already built into the iPhone, which was designed for exactly this situation and walks you through revoking access in plain language. Prune the follower lists, including the connections that feel harmless. Cut off camera and car app access. Pause the next time an app requests a permission it has no legitimate reason to want.
And for every listener who has been told by friends that she is paranoid and ridiculous, Jonathan offers the line worth the entire episode. It is only paranoia if you are not right about it.
One small step a day still counts. This is a marathon, and every setting you turn off is protection you did not have yesterday.
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