Tips for protecting your privacy during divorce

Divorce is a highly personal, emotional process. Spouses can be angry and hurt, and everything from details about your marital life to your financial assets can be put out in the open. For people who value their privacy, this can be unsettling.

As such, if you are going through a divorce, you can take the following steps to protect your privacy.

1. Stay off social media. If you want to keep others from knowing the intimate details of your divorce, be careful not to disclose them yourself. Too often, people share things on their social media, thinking they will be private or disappear after a while. However, the things you say and do online can easily be shared and preserved, even if that was not your intention.
2. Resolve matters outside of court. Litigation creates a public record, even in family law cases. Any interested party could access that record. To avoid this, you can stay out of court by resolving as many issues as possible in alternative dispute resolution platforms such as arbitration or mediation –  processes that (with some exceptions) allow parties to keep details of their split confidential.
3. Pursue legal protections. There are legal measures that can protect people’s privacy in a divorce, and they can be especially beneficial for people with concerns about their safety or their child’s safety. The courts have the authority to seal a divorce record; they can use initials instead of people’s full names in court documents; they can “sanitize” files involving children. These measures are not feasible in every case, so you can talk to your lawyer about whether you might want to pursue them.

Privacy during a divorce is important to people for many reasons. They might not want everyone to know what assets they have or where they are. They could have safety concerns. They may be in the public eye or a business owner, and having personal details aired in public could mean damaged reputations.

Whatever your reasons for wanting to protect your privacy during divorce may be, these steps can help you do so.