A British man is ridiculously attempting to sue Apple following a divorce, caused by his wife finding messages to a prostitute he deleted from his iPhone that were still accessible on an iMac.
In the last years of his marriage, a man referred to as “Richard” started to use the services of prostitutes, without his wife’s knowledge. To try and keep the communications secret, he used iMessages on his iPhone, but then deleted the messages.
Despite being careful on his iPhone to cover his tracks, he didn’t count on Apple’s ecosystem automatically synchronizing his messaging history with the family iMac. Apparently, he wasn’t careful enough to use Family Sharing for iCloud, or discrete user accounts on the Mac.
The Times reports the wife saw the message when she opened iMessage on the iMac. She also saw years of messages to prostitutes, revealing a long period of infidelity by her husband.
I use Signal as well and that’s what came to mind. Let’s assume I cheated on my wife and hired prostitutes using Signal on my phone. She could use my Windows PC, open Signal there, then see the cheater texts. This isn’t the fault of Signal, Apple, or Microsoft. It did the thing I asked it to do - sync messages. I would have fucked up by letting someone use my Windows login.
Good thing we don’t share accounts, aside from some very short term usage. That’s just a bad idea, even if it’s little personalization type things. Not messaging hookers probably goes a long way too.
I think the issue comes that it only syncs messages one way and doesn’t sync on deletions. Apple should have messages that are removed from all devices when removed from the phone, but it didn’t remove messages when deleted.
Sure the guy is a moron for being a cheater and scumbag, but Apple should remove deleted messages. That’s a privacy problem with Apple’s sync. I don’t use Apple devices due to other Apple crap, but setting up iCloud sync should have a warning when items won’t be deleted and only will be downloaded to devices.
Wasn’t an entire stupid movie about the horrible sync pitfalls in Apple devices premiered years ago?
Why? My laptop has more storage than my phone. Sometimes I need to save a conversation for future reference, and want photos on my laptop where I have more storage, not on my phone.
Sorry I’m late, but I would say that that case means a system should have rules to define when and where the majority of the files are at. Or at least a defined way to declare which system is one-way, and which is two-way.
The old Google Calendar system had that flag, so I find it strange that Apple wouldn’t, unless they really want to push the iCloud data Subscription model.
