Case Description

Mr. A and Ms. B are in a marital relationship, and their relationship is not good. Therefore, Ms. B suspects that her husband has an improper relationship with others during marriage. One day, while Mr. A was unprepared, Ms. B checked Mr. A's mobile phone and found that Mr. A's mobile phone contained many photos and chat content about improper interactions with other women, so she confronted Mr. A. However, after Mr. A learned about it, he believed that Ms. B had no right to peek at his mobile phone, which seriously violated his privacy right, and therefore filed a lawsuit in court.

Lawyer Analysis

Article 1032 of the Civil Code stipulates that natural persons enjoy the right to privacy. No organization or individual may infringe upon the privacy rights of others by means of spying, intrusion, disclosure, or disclosure. Privacy is a private space, activity, and information that a natural person's private life is peaceful and they do not want to be known to others. It can be seen that the right to privacy is a legal right enjoyed by every natural person. Although both men and women form a marital status relationship due to marriage, legal rights related to physical health rights, reputation and privacy of natural persons do not disappear due to marriage, and they are still protected by law. Therefore, citizens still enjoy the right to privacy after marriage.

However, due to the certain particularity of the identity of the relationship between husband and wife, the couple has a duty of loyalty, which belongs to personal privacy for ordinary citizens, and each other has a relatively broad right to know in the relationship between husband and wife. Therefore, the protection of the right to privacy between husband and wife is complex. While enjoying the right to privacy, it is not always absolutely protected. In practice, whether one party's behavior constitutes an infringement of the other party's privacy rights is generally judged from two aspects: whether the purpose of the behavior is legitimate, and whether the means of the behavior are legitimate. "When the purpose is legitimate and the means are also legitimate, it will not be considered an infringement.".

Courts usually hold that couples have a moral obligation to be loyal to each other, and one party has the right to intervene and even investigate whether the other party has committed improper acts that violate the obligation of loyalty, that is, the act is justified in purpose. On this basis, it is necessary to specifically analyze whether the methods used are legitimate. Regarding the behavior of checking a mobile phone, the court tends to believe that mastering the other party's mobile phone password conforms to the normal life of ordinary couples. If one party suspects that the other party has an extramarital relationship and involves marital and family interests, obtaining information due to mastering the mobile phone password and not taking other aggressive actions does not constitute an infringement. Of course, in practice, there are also situations where one party does not master the password and obtains the password in other ways to unlock the phone. For example, use fingerprint unlocking while your spouse is asleep. Some courts have held that although there are irregularities in such acts, the reasons for determining the infringement of the spouse's privacy rights are insufficient without public disclosure or dissemination. In addition, from the perspective of evidence effectiveness, it is common to look at mobile phones to obtain evidence in divorce proceedings. When determining the validity of evidence, courts often do not identify such evidence as evidence obtained illegally, and the court believes that one party has committed a breach of loyalty obligations during the marriage, and that they also have faults. The suspicion of the other party conforms to the natural reflection of a spouse's identity, and the other party has the right to know whether their exclusive identity rights as a spouse have been threatened or violated. It can be seen that flipping through a mobile phone between a husband and wife cannot generally be considered an inevitable violation of privacy.

It should be noted that if any investigation is conducted by using methods such as installing eavesdropping devices, tracking devices, sneaking into another person's residence or hotel to install a camera device, which infringes on the legitimate rights and interests of others, violates legal prohibitions, or seriously violates public order and good customs, or conducts dissemination and dissemination after obtaining relevant information, it will be deemed to constitute an infringement.