When you invite a total stranger into your home to do the dirty work, they just might be digging up your dirtiest secrets while at it. When you hand over your house keys to a housekeeper and expect them to spend a few hours cleaning, of course you already know that they are going to know more about you by the time they are done. What you might not know, however, is just how much these housekeepers can really know about your life, just by cleaning out your fridge, bedroom, or bathroom cabinets.

"The first hour in a client's home is like speed-dating," says Angela Brown, founder of the Savvy Cleaner Training and Certification for House Cleaners & Maids, quoted in Business Insider. From stress levels to specifics about your sex life, a house cleaner can sniff out a myriad of telling things without actually snooping. It's basically a meet-and-greet in which both parties dig through a whole bunch of subtext.”

"I'm a perfect stranger and I'm going to be working inside their most valuable asset — their home. Alongside their children, their elderly parents, and their pets," she continues, "In that first visit, we both have to decide if we're a good fit for each other."

Similarly, another housekeeper, featured on Pocket, talks about the life-changing discoveries she made cleaning the properties of the rich. According to her, letting a cleaning lady into your home would pretty much tell the cleaning lady everything she needs to know about your work-life balance, your relationship status, the state of your health, and a couple of other intimate or embarrassing details you never thought you would be sharing with a complete stranger about your life. According to the writer, this happens because housekeepers are prone to snooping. In her words, “We work alone. We get bored. What do you expect?”

In the article entitled: I spent 2 years cleaning houses. What I saw makes me never want to be rich, the writer says her findings while snooping were quite depressing, “I started looking through the piles of papers instead of straightening them,” she says“I looked for secrets in the nightstands, for the story below the American dream. I searched for the stashes of empty wine bottles and peeked into medicine cabinets. I checked how many pills they'd taken in two weeks and learned which prescriptions had turned into recreations. I found pills for everything: pain, anxiety, sleeplessness, depression, impotence, allergies, high blood pressure, diabetes. There were other medications, too. My personal favourite: a topical testosterone cream.”

Other things your housekeeper can snoop out while cleaning includes your financial situation, your diet, and pretty much all your vices. The writer claims the things she found while cleaning was so sad she was forced to stop snooping. In her words,“I stopped snooping after that. I didn't have to. The bigger the house, the more they worked to afford it, the more prescription bottles they had,”“I vowed never to have a house bigger than I could clean myself.”