lip open your husband's cell phone and scroll down the log of calls received. Glance over your teenager's shoulder at his screenful of instant messages. Type in a girlfriend's password and rifle through her e-mail.

There was a time when unearthing someone's private thoughts and deeds required sliding a hand beneath a mattress, fishing out a diary and hurriedly skimming its pages.

But digital technology has made uncovering secrets such a painless, antiseptic process that the boundary delineating what is permissible in a relationship appears to be shifting.

In interviews and on blogs across the Web, people report that they snoop and spy on others -- friends, family, colleagues -- unencumbered by anxiety or guilt.

"Now we can trace the record of partners' cell phone calls, we can go through all their sent e-mails if we're devious enough and clever enough," said Thomas N. Bradbury, a professor of psychology at UCLA, and director of the Marriage and Family Development Project. "That is fundamentally a new phenomenon under the sun."

Most of the people who readily admitted in interviews to spying on their children, lovers or spouses asked that they not be identified. And in Internet forums, chat groups, blogs and newspaper advice columns, their confessions are anonymous. But they are also plentiful.

"So I snooped through his computer and found e-mails confirming that he'd dated and slept with at least one other girl," reads an anonymous June post at ask. metafilter.com.

One woman said in an interview that she woke up one night to check the cell phone of a man she was dating and that she believes she had good reason: She was suspicious about who he had been talking to, closeted in the bathroom, earlier that day.

"No one wants to be a snoop," said the woman, who works in marketing in Manhattan and who admitted that her search turned up nothing. "People think better of themselves."

Maybe Googling your date, a new acquaintance or an incoming boss was the first step down the slippery slope of digital snooping. Now many people use Google Earth (earth.google.com) to see satellite images of a colleague's home, even the car parked in the driveway. They know that in New York City deeds have been scanned and posted to the online city register, Automated City Register Information System, so you can find out how much your neighbor paid for her house.

A subscription to nexis.com may enable one to learn what political party people are affiliated with, dates of birth and the names of other family members who live with them. And on MySpace, you can learn everything from whether a person is in a relationship, to his or her taste in music, books and friends.

Snooping gets more serious with powerful surveillance software like Spector Pro, which captures every keystroke a computer user types and allows the installer, with a password, to access information about the target user's instant messages, e-mails and Web sites visited. SpectorSoft, the maker of Spector Pro, says it sells 40,000 copies a year, about triple the sales of four years ago, and many parents are customers.

"Someone's always looking," said Aftab, who is the executive director of WiredSafety.org, an online safety and education group, which receives about 1,000 complaints a month, she said, from people who are targets of electronic spying or stalking. "It's so easy and so many people are doing it that a lot of people don't realize how often they're being spied on," she said.

Some experts cautioned that the toll snooping takes on relationships is too high to justify it. Jay Lebow, a clinical professor of psychology at the Family Institute at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., said parents are overstepping a boundary and jeopardizing trust when they spy on their children, even when they read through their MySpace and Friendster profiles. The only times it's warranted, he said, are when you strongly suspect something, like drug use.

Stephen Larkin, an independent publicist in Manhattan, learned the voice mail password of someone he was dating and listened to cell phone messages. He ended the relationship because he did not like what he heard. He said he knew it was wrong to spy and by doing so he felt he lost what he called his "moral high ground." Nowadays he tries to respect other people's privacy, he said, but he cannot quite help running his eyes over friends' electronic devices from time to time.

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