Get Premium
Dark mode theme is available exclusively for premium users. Learn more about the benefits of subscribing.
No fees, cancel anytime.
Dark Mode 
No fees, cancel anytime 
If someone got hold of your phone, what would they find? Some cute pics of your pets or kids? A grocery shopping list, meeting reminders, a bit of gossip between you and your friends? Maybe your bank balance and the last dumb question you asked ChatGPT? Or would they come across something a lot more embarrassing or sinister?
Someone recently asked, "What is the worst thing you ever saw on someone else's phone?" and the answers read like a set of files the world has been waiting for... From cringe images, to NSFW (Not Safe For Work) content and even criminal acts, people have been spilling the tea that they were never meant to have in the first place.
Bored Panda has gone through more than 2,200 replies and put together a list of the best ones for you to scroll through while you wait for that privacy app to download in the background. May they serve as a reminder that your best-kept secrets are never 100% safe, even when you think they are.
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
When I worked retail, we had a regular customer (maybe early 20’s) who would come in and always search for me specifically to help him find the same three items. He would never speak and typed everything on his phone to communicate. It seemed mostly harmless at first, and I assumed he had a mental handicap of some sort, so I always happily helped him find the items he wanted, even though he’d come in for them before multiple times. Then again, I was really young and naive.
One day, he found me folding clothes and held a conversation with me about a trip he just came back from. He wanted to show me photos of his vacation, so when he scrolled down his gallery, I spotted a photo album with my face as the cover. I had instant chills, but acted calm until he left and then notified security.
Every time he came in after that day, I would wait in our employee-only area while security kept tabs on him. They soon caught him sneaking pictures of other staff and customers and banned him from the premises….
Our phones have become portals to our private affairs. They often hold confidential and sometimes sensitive information that's meant for our eyes, and our eyes only. But if we're not careful, our best kept secrets can come tumbling out - or flying off our screens - faster than we can hit the lock button.
Carrying a smartphone is almost like carrying a fully functional laptop or PC in your pocket. And similar to a laptop, there are steps you should be taking to protect your data.
RELATED:
#2
I was backing up the photo library on my mom’s phone to my dad’s computer after she passed away. The last picture she took was a selfie in the hospital, in her bed, looking awful, tubes coming out of everywhere, but she was smiling. I barely held it together and then completely lost it on the car ride home.
#3
When my husband changed my name in his phone from a pet name to my actual name. I knew we were growing apart, but that was a gut punch.
Jaya 5 hours ago
I wouldn't see it as a sign of growing apart, to be honest. It could also be that his taste changed now finds it silly to use such nicknames in his phone, or that he feels he's too old and that he should act more mature than that. Or it could be the other direction, that he's cheating or planning to (if the pet name was something like sweetheart, then the other woman would see that and know that he's probably in a relationship)
#4
My ex-husband’s message to his parents, telling them I was “blowing up at him for no reason” and he “didn’t know what to do.”
I had caught him cheating, found out he’d been cheating for the entirety of our relationship, and yes, I was angry. I told him that if he wanted to repair our relationship, what he had to do was stop lying. (So, he did indeed know what he needed to do.)
He told everyone around me that I had “lost it”, so when I was ready to explain to others that we were divorcing because he was a liar, manipulator, and a cheater, no one believed me.
That was quite the learning experience.
#5
A Tinder notification popped up on my dad's phone while he was showing me photos of my mom's birthday dinner.
She was sitting right across the table, smiling at him. I've never felt so sick in my life.
Nichole Harris 11 hours ago
I'd have called him out right then and there....."wait.... Dad, why are you getting a notification from tinder? Isn't that for random hookups
#6
I used to manage our company's iPhone fleet and would routinely find tabs of adult content of every conceivable flavor in Safari.
I generally never said anything to management unless it was on their company computers.
It got to the point where I would tell them while standing in front of them, open safari and close every tab before you hand me the phone.
#7
Nothing crazy, but I watched a guy on the bus gambling on his phone. It was just sad seeing him lose over and over. It’s like those dystopian gifs of senior citizens hypnotized by the slot machines. He looked a bit rough too, so I’m sure he needed the money which made it worse.
#8
My boss was showing me a photo of his new dog. He swiped one too many times and it was a full-screen, high-res selfie of him in a Batman mask... and nothing else.
We didn't speak for the rest of the week.
Sue Denham 17 hours ago
And he wasn't quick witted enough to say 'Oh, hey, that's my friend, Clayton being an idiot,"?
#9
A picture of a torso floating in a lake, which they were fishing at when it was found.
UnclePanda 8 hours ago
I always wonder about the shiver that went down the back of the first person to say, "I don't think that's a log."
#10
My ex telling some random girl he wished he was cuddling in bed with her right after we got back from taking my dad to the er.
#11
I was at a concert with floor tickets. As everyone was standing tightly packed together the girl directly in front of me opened her notes app to a note titled “fart log”. The note contained a list of dates and times. She logged a fart that she did in that moment.
🇳🇬 Asi Bassey 🇳🇬 16 hours ago
Probably has medical reasons. I would not describe this as ‘worst thing’.
#12
Genuine answer: accidentally saw a picture of my step dad's body. My mom took a pic at the morgue in her grief to 'remember him'. Took me a sec to understand it wasn't just a pic of him sleeping. Was helping my mom get things together for his memorial. I was 15.
Huddo's sister 11 hours ago
I had a similar experience. When I was 20 my little brother died. I didn't want to see him after (he died at home) but a while later I was copying photos from my mum's hard drive and came across photos of him she had taken.
#13
First date with a man I had been talking to over an app. My one picture from the app was his lockscreen photo. I didn't see it til the end of the already bad date. I bolted out of there as gracefully as I could and blocked him on everything.
#14
I had a *feeling* so when he was in the shower I went through his phone and saw he was telling one of his friends about how hot one of my friends was. He was listing her qualities like he was gonna date her next. We broke up within a week.
#15
Screenshots of me in my underwear on Skype
Edited for storytime: I was like 8 months into a relationship and had walked away from my computer as I was on a Skype call with my boyfriend. After we hung out one day, he left his phone in my car. I was freshly 19 and very naive and went through his pics to look at all the cute ones we’d been taking. Then i swiped through multiple screenshots. This was the first red flag but since the bar is set in hell, i just talked to him about it and told him not to do it again. It ended up being the first time he would screenshot me or take photos of me secretly (sometimes not so secretly) during intimate moments. It was a constant issue. I would tell him to stop. I never wanted my photos to end up in the wrong hands and posted all over the internet. Fast forward 4 years post breakup and it turns out he was the wrong hands all along. I discovered a mystery new follower on reddit. I went to their NSFW page and scrolled down to a thumbnail of a bare body. It was mine. And it was a link to a website where there were multiple videos that were secretly recorded while we were together. The account had been created the year we started dating and the profile pic was a photo of me. I filed a police report but nothing ever came of it because i had just gone through something extremely traumatic months before this discovery and didn’t feel safe enough to follow through and he had hired a really good lawyer too.
#16
Poo.
A coworker was flipping through photos of his garden. He flipped too far. It was a picture of a giant loaf that his wife did. It was so big he had to take a picture of it. He wasn't wrong. That thing needed an episiotomy.
#17
A guy in Vegas was bragging about having an iPhone in 2009 (kind of a big deal at that time to have one) he was trying so hard to get me up to his room, and thought showing me his phone would make me swoon? He forgot his lock screen was a pic of his family. I wasn't going regardless, but that sealed the deal.
#18
I worked in retail at a business where, amongst many other things, we had some self-serve photo kiosks you could print off photos.
A lovely lady (probably 50-60s) wanted help, normal non-tech savvy. Got her phone plugged in, and on the screen came up a small army of photos of her parent who had passed away (totally unrelated to the photo she wanted to print). I had seen worse on the internet but she decided that this was an appropriate time to show me more of the photos where she believed her parent was being mistreated in her elderly home, with some quite graphic (to me at the time) photos of bruising/sores...
You get a thick skin in retail, but nothing topped being flashbanged with a cadaver.
#19
My girlfriends husband, I didn’t have a clue until then. She would spend the night, go on trips with me.
#20
My x brother in law had a picture of his underage adopted daughter flashing him and covering her face with her shirt. He tried playing it off like it was his wife.
#21
Mine is a little more funny. A woman I worked with COMPLETELY PLATONIC, was scrolling through pics of her dogs and kids, we always talked about dogs, and she scrolls and it's a picture of me she screenshotted from Instagram. She turned red and said it was just to show her husband what I looked like. Was quite odd.....
#22
A friend let me borrow his phone to take a quick pic of something. Opened camera roll by accident—hundreds of photos of random women's feet on public transport, all zoomed in super close. Like, airport security line feet, bus seats feet. He just laughed it off like 'yeah I'm kinda into that.' I still get chills thinking about it.
#23
Saw my father actively sending money to a woman he met online. Told he loved her and couldn’t wait to meet her. All while sitting 5 feet away from my mother on the couch…needless to say that I ratted him out.
#24
Let’s see. this kid in highschool was really obsessed with liveleak and all of that and unprovoked would just go “yo look at this” and turn the phone and it’s someone getting decapitated. dude i’m at work. can we not.
#25
My exs phone. Her mom texted her and I saw that the last time they texted, a month earlier, my ex said she didnt want to be with me anymore. 11 years gone. Im over it because that was almost 4 years ago now. She's engaged to a man that's her dad's older friend. he is 68ish and she is 35
#26
I saw a guy shopping in the grocery store with a post-it-note stuck to his phone with his grocery list he was reading from.
#27
My father who i haven't spoken to in 16 years sent a message to my now ex who was mistreating me. My ex replied and said something along the lines of "you know how she is" My father said he was a great influence on me. My ex had told me my father reached out but not that he replied. It was an egregious act of betrayal.
#29
A drunken friend showed me a video that he made. He was recording his mum ( through the crack in the door) getting dressed after a shower.
#30
60+ open tabs in their web browser, most of which were 18+ sites.
#31
Pictures of myself 🫠 it was the company’s business coach and he’d taken pictures of me to send to the owner cause he didn’t like what I was wearing, and later that day he’d spent an absurd amount of time cleaning something and was showing me pictures of it trying to say it took him 10 minutes, and I saw the pictures of me. It didn’t register quickly enough because I was already mad about the cleaning thing, but later I talked to the area manager and he’s how I know why the pics were taken, but I still asked him to do his best to make sure the guy deleted them ☠️.
#33
I’m a vet. One time I was performing a euthanasia on a dog, which can be an incredibly heartbreaking yet beautiful experience. Owners will often show old photos of their pet to me in the quiet moments after they have passed as they reflect on the beautiful memories they shared over the years.
In this case, the dog had passed away peacefully and the owner wants to show me a cute photo from when she first adopted him. Immediately swipes to a full zoomed-in view of her bottom as I used every semblance of strength to pretend I hadn’t noticed. She then tried quickly swiping to the next photo, which unfortunately was the same angle, only more zoomed in.
#34
Probably not the worst but the thing I hated the most was seeing someone have the little red notification symbol (at least on iPhone) that they had over 300 text messages. Everything else has red notification alerts too. I hated it. I keep anything that builds up notifications I can’t clear, off my main screen so I don’t have to look at it.
Chich the witch 18 hours ago
Guess some people have phones for their convenience, not everyone else's.
#35
A screen protector so shattered that it was literally shedding shards of glass, yet they were still scrolling like everything was fine. It looked like a spider web held together by fingerprints and hope. My thumb hurt just looking at it!
#37
A video on “How to French kiss”.
#38
My girlfriend at the time cheated on me, about 6 months ago, I forgave her. Had a bad feeling and looked through her phone to find her sending pictures to one of our coworkers.
#39
One of my coworkers was showing me a picture on her phone. While I was looking at it, a text message came through saying something to the effect of, “…Bend you over and spank you…”
I gave the phone back quickly. Coworker was slightly embarrassed.
#41
A phone handed to me with the gallery open and the very first thing on the screen was extremely explicit photos they clearly forgot existed. The confidence they had while passing the phone made it so much worse.
#42
And old man was in a restaurant with his wife and kids and his phone brightness was on full blast. He had a photo of a young model in a bikini as his wallpaper. bad quality too, probably a low-resolution downloaded photo.
#43
A handed a coworker my phone to see a picture and told her which way to swipe. She swiped the opposite way, because left and right don't *really* make sense on a phone and she saw a saved post I'd made on Snapchat that just said "Why does Tiktok think I want to be pegged, and how does it know?".
#45
I was serving and this like 35 early 40s guy was having dinner with his parents, looking super disinterested. I came up behind him to give them their sodas and dude was on grinder talking to twinks.
#46
My wife is a large animal vet, so her photo gallery is littered with pictures of necropsies, surgeries, and gnarly injuries.
Huddo's sister 11 hours ago
My sister did work experience at a vet when she was 16 and has photos from a srugery on a dog. I found it quite interesting.
#47
Race week in Daytona for the Rolex and one of the race team guys left his phone. If it’s unlocked we would usually go to contacts and call anyone labeled mom or wife or anything like that to let them know someone left the phone. This time we open it and it was left on messages and there was a picture of a guy in a car with blood everywhere. It was in Spanish and I don’t know Spanish like that so I brought it to one of the guys that did and he said it said “good and get the powder out of the lights and go” I wiped that phone down real quick and put it in the safe. The next day I came back to work and it was gone.
#48
The app locations on my fathers phone. There's no rhyme or reason and they're scattered in an inconvenient way. Drove me bananas to see.
Explore more of these tags
You May Like “I Could Solve A Missing Person’s Case”: 69 Shocking And Dark Secrets That Could Ruin People’s Lives 35 Americans Share The Good Things Happening In The U.S. That No One Talks About
Jonas Žvilius
Rūta Zumbrickaitė
Related on Bored Panda
