How to keep your sex life private on your phone

Most of what a couple does on their phones is fine until someone else is holding the phone: a child who wants to watch a video, a colleague looking at a photo, a friend scrolling your camera roll for the picture you promised. This guide is about the places your sex life leaks, and what to do about each one.

1. The messaging app you use for everything else

Sexting in the same app you use for the school group chat means the school group chat is one swipe away from it — and vice versa. Previews show on the lock screen, threads sit in the same list, and “recent photos” pulls from one roll. The fix is separation: keep the flirting in a place that is only for the two of you, and that never shows message text on the lock screen unless you have said it may.

2. The camera roll

Anything shot with the camera app lands in the roll, then in your cloud backup, then in “memories” slideshows and “photos of you” collections. If you take intimate photos or videos, record them inside an app that stores them privately and never writes to the roll — and delete anything that did land there, including from “Recently Deleted”.

3. Notes and reminders

The notes app is where a lot of fantasies and bucket lists end up, and its search shows first lines to anyone typing in it. Keep that kind of writing behind its own lock.

4. The app itself

A phone lock protects a locked phone. The moment you hand an unlocked phone over, every app on it is open. Anything that holds intimate content should have its own PIN — asked for when it is opened and again after it has been in the background — so a borrowed phone meets a keypad instead of your journal.

5. Notifications

Decide, per app, what a notification may say. For a partner chat you may want the words; for everything else, “you have a message” is plenty. The best setting is one that follows your account, so a new phone does not silently reset it to “show everything”.

6. Anything you write publicly

If you post in a community, use a nickname that nobody in your life would recognise, and never details that place you: your town, your job, your partner's name.

What Cadence does

All of the above, on purpose: a partner chat that lives only in the app with a per-account lock-screen setting, in-app video recording that never touches the camera roll, a journal with pages your partner cannot see unless you share them, a PIN on the app itself, and a community that only knows your nickname. It's free, and it works whether you are one person or two.