For years, unfaithful partners have turned to burner phones, erased messages and elaborate excuses to conceal secret relationships.
Now, however, technology expert Kim Komando says artificial intelligence is quickly undermining those strategies by linking thousands of seemingly unrelated digital details into one potentially incriminating story.
A location ping, toll-road transaction, license-plate scan, credit-card charge, deleted text or security-camera clip could each serve as a digital breadcrumb pointing toward a hidden affair.
And the risk may persist long after a relationship ends. As AI becomes more capable, it can search through decades-old data breaches and uncover connections within minutes.
“If it exists in digital form, treat it like it could end up on a billboard,” Komando told Our News Outlet. “Because someday, somewhere, it might.”
Komando said people should now assume that private digital secrets could eventually surface. “This is not a someday problem, it is a next-12-months problem,” she said.
“The tools to scrape, match and expose someone’s private life already exist. What’s changing is the price and the skill it takes to run them, and both are dropping fast,” she added.
“Once a scammer can point AI at a pile of stolen data and have it stitch together an affair, a secret or a lie in minutes, blackmail stops being targeted and starts being automated.
“My advice to anyone reading this: assume the embarrassing thing you did online is findable, and act like it today, not the day the email lands.”
Even relationships that ended years ago could remain vulnerable as AI scans decades-old data breaches in minutes.
Komando cited the 2015 Ashley Madison breach, in which hackers exposed the personal information of approximately 37 million users of the website marketed to people seeking extramarital affairs.
But she warned that the danger is significantly greater today than it was a decade ago, largely because AI can process vast stores of stolen information almost instantly.
“Marriages ended. Careers ended,” Komando said of the fallout from the Ashley Madison hack.
“That was more than a decade ago, before AI could sort through stolen data at superhuman speed.
“Here’s the rule I tell everyone: if it exists in digital form, treat it like it could end up on a billboard. Because someday, somewhere, it might.”
Her comments come as cybersecurity specialists warn that the internet is entering a more dangerous phase, with AI accelerating the speed and sophistication of online attacks.
Cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks reported that daily attacks affecting its clients quadrupled between 2024 and 2025. Other experts have warned that companies are now being targeted “every single day.”
Deleting revealing texts or photographs may offer little protection, Komando said, because digital records are rarely erased as completely as people assume.
Asked whether it is realistically possible to have an affair today without creating any digital trail, she replied: “Only if you’re willing to live like it’s 1985.
“No phone in your pocket, cash for everything, no toll roads, no modern car, no smart doorbell on either end.”
The tech expert pointed to the 2015 Ashley Madison hack, when the personal details of roughly 37 million users of the website, designed for those seeking extramarital affairs, were leaked
She explained that the average American is quietly tracked dozens of times each day by connected devices they rarely think about.
Phones constantly communicate with nearby cell towers, modern vehicles store location histories, smart doorbells record visitors and apps log movements in the background.
‘You’d need the discipline of a spy and the lifestyle of a hermit,’ Komando said. ‘Real people have neither.’
She believes AI has fundamentally changed how criminals process stolen information.
In the past, hackers who stole millions of records still had to sift through mountains of data manually.
Today, AI can automatically connect information pulled from multiple breaches.
‘It cross-references your email from one breach, your home address from another, your dating profile from a third, and builds a dossier on you automatically,’ Komando explained.
She pointed to industry figures showing how quickly the threat is growing, noting that cybersecurity company CrowdStrike reported AI-enabled cyberattacks jumped 89 percent in a single year, while AI-generated phishing emails have surged more than 1,200 percent since ChatGPT launched.
‘The grunt work that used to take a criminal weeks now takes software seconds,’ she said.
Experts also warn that hackers are now using AI to create malware that can adapt to evade detection, while stolen databases that once took criminals hours to sift through can now be analyzed in minutes.
Kim Komando believes people have already entered an age where they should assume their digital secrets could eventually come to light
Komando warned that deleting evidence rarely makes it disappear forever.
‘When you hit delete, most companies don’t actually shred your data,’ she said.
‘They flag it, archive it, or keep it in backups for months or years.’
Metadata, records showing who contacted whom, when and from where, often survives even longer than the messages themselves.
That means future data breaches may expose not only what exists today, but digital records people believed had vanished years ago.
‘Your past isn’t protected by time,’ Komando said. ‘It’s waiting in storage.’
She likened old data breaches to sealed envelopes that AI is only now learning to open.
‘Data stolen in breaches from 2012, 2015, 2018 is still floating around out there,’ she said. ‘Back then, it was a useless pile of hay. Millions of random emails, texts and location logs that no criminal had the patience to dig through. AI changed the math.’
‘The affair you thought you got away with in 2014? The evidence didn’t disappear. Nobody has read it yet.’
Komando said people often underestimate just how many digital trails they leave behind every day.
Among them are location histories stored on smartphones, toll transponders, license plate readers, vehicle GPS logs, hotel loyalty programs, airline accounts, fitness trackers, smart home devices and payment apps.
Even family technology can become a source of evidence.
‘Shared photo albums, shared streaming profiles, Find My on the family plan,’ she said. ‘Your household is a surveillance network you installed yourself and pay a monthly fee for.’
Even if someone carefully deletes messages, Komando said, copies often remain elsewhere.
Photos can stay in ‘recently deleted’ folders for weeks, text messages are preserved in cloud backups and phone carriers maintain records showing which numbers communicated and when.
More importantly, deleting one copy does nothing to erase the version stored on someone else’s phone or computer.
‘You can only delete your half of a conversation,’ Komando said. She also argued that attempts to hide an affair may create suspicious patterns of their own.
‘A phone that mysteriously powers off every Thursday at 6pm is a pattern,’ she said. ‘A sudden switch to a secret messaging app is a pattern. Absence of data is data.’
According to Komando, AI excels at recognizing exactly those kinds of patterns.
Two phones appearing at the same location every week, recurring gas station purchases far from home, or repeated visits supposedly made to the gym without corresponding fitness activity may each appear meaningless on their own.
But AI can rapidly combine thousands of those seemingly unrelated clues.
‘Finding patterns humans miss in oceans of boring data is literally what the technology does best,’ she said.
The growing cyber threat means those clues may become available to criminals far more quickly than in the past.
Moody’s Ratings found the average time it takes hackers to exploit a newly disclosed software vulnerability has plunged from more than 700 days in 2020 to just 44 days in 2025, faster than many organizations can patch the flaws.
Asked whether anyone could still have an affair without leaving digital evidence in today, Komando’s answer was unequivocal.
‘I’d tell them no,’ she said. ‘Between phones, cars, cameras, cards and AI that can stitch it all together, there is no clean getaway anymore.’
‘The only truly affair-proof technology ever invented is not having one,’ she added. ‘Everything else leaves a receipt.’
