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.
The article tries to say that this is ridiculous, but I don’t see it.
Sure, he’s a cheater, and he got caught. Not particularly sympathetic.
But, Apple markets their products as privacy-respecting, he deleted something he wanted to keep secret, and his Apple products betrayed him and revealed his secret to someone else, resulting in real-world consequences.
Apple should be held to account for the privacy violation at the very least.
revealed his secret to someone else
I generally don’t like Apple, but I think crying about privacy violation because someone you’re willingly sharing your account with saw your stuff is not reasonable.
My kid sometimes takes pictures of my SO naked because they know how to access the camera. My SO deletes them as soon as they find them. If those pictures were synced to another computer, the expectation is that those pictures would be deleted from that other computer as well. Not deleting those pictures on the other computer is absolutely a privacy concern.
That’s the case here as well. It’s reasonable to think of iMessage as one blob of data, where deleting from one device deletes all copies from other devices. In Apple jargon, it should “just work.” If it doesn’t “just work” as a reasonable person would expect and that results in damages, I think it’s reasonable for Apple to share in those damages.
My kid sometimes takes pictures of my SO naked because they know how to access the camera.
WTF?
It would absolutely be a privacy concern if someone without the rights to access this data could access it from the computer.
My understanding is that it’s the same account logged on both devices. Computers are multi-users devices. No technology ever would protect your secret stuff from someone you’ve just shared your personal account with.
It’s a problem that deletion is not perfectly synchronized, yes. It certainly is a privacy risk because an unauthorized intruder could find them. But in this particular case, there’s no intrusion. The wife just had normal access to these messages in the first place.
Except he used the same account for his prostitute texting device as for the family pc.
It’s simple user error. You can’t have privacy from someone else who shares the same login.
I don’t have any Apple devices so I don’t understand why deleting the message from one device doesn’t delete it from another. What is the point of a sync in that case?
Deleting messages from an iPhone WILL delete them from other devices - assuming you’ve opted to let it to do that, and then even still, there may be a delay until the next sync happens.
I’ve deleted messages on my iPhone and they’ll linger on my MacBook for a good while, depending on circumstances. (ie, if the MacBook wasn’t on network when the messages were deleted).
I’m not sure about the specifics in the Apple ecosystem but I imagine it’s like an email address that’s connected as IMAP on one main PC, and as POP3 on your phone.
You can download the mails you need to your phone to read them and answer them on the go.
But the mail server is synched to the PC. So deleting stuff on your phone just deletes the messages on your phone, not on the server and not on the PC.
I use Apple sync on all my devices including my computer and it does delete from one device to another IF you have sync set up properly. And it’s not instantaneous, it happens when the cloud sync happens. When the computer is off or in sleep, it’s not syncing and once it’s woken up, sometimes it takes a minute to sync up. My guess, it was either not set up right or it hadn’t sync’d yet.
Other possibility, he didn’t know about the deleted folder where deleted messages sit for 30 days unless you clear it (like a computer trash can).
While I don’t necessarily agree in this case, you did remind me of something Justice Kirby (an Australia Hugh Court (our highest court) Judge) wrote in his dissent in Carr v Western Australia.^1
“He was a smart alec for whom it is hard to feel much sympathy. But the police were public officials bound to comply with the law. We should uphold the appellant’s rights because doing so is an obligation that is precious for everyone. It is cases like this that test this Court. It is no real test to afford the protection of the law to the clearly innocent, the powerful and the acclaimed.”
^1 232 CLR 138, 188 [170].
Dunno how it is Apples fault that he didn’t take the time to understand how the tools that he uses work.
If I plow my car into a crowd of people because I mistake the gas for the brake that is not GM’s fault.
I’m not aware of the delete label in iMessage being labeled “delete from every device that you own and have signed into iMessage”.
There are numerous documented ways to avoid the situation he put himself in, he didn’t bother to find one and is now trying to blame others for his stupidity.
Not OK with his behaviour, definitely OK with Apple coughing up 100 million quid for the bloke and his wife
I’m OK with any excuse for Apple to lose money. Do not condone his behavior personally
it doesn’t sound ridiculous to me. regardless of the backstory, the issue was that he deleted something and it didn’t work. it could have been a password or picture of his balls or something. Apple should pay up
No it sounds like he (and you) didn’t understand the technology and thought it acted in a way it didn’t. Expecting Apple to be liable for this is buffoonery.
Does Apple have actual instructions and documentation that explains this? I honestly didn’t know, as I’ve never used iMessage.
Yes, they do.
This article is short on details but basically the situation is that for most of the lifetime of iMessage, you sign in with your Mac and your phone and your iPad and whatever. These messages are not synced. If you sign in on a new device, the old one’s don’t show up. If you delete from one device it has no affect on the other.
Later they introduced iMessage in iCloud , which is an opt in service. iMessage in iCloud, once set up on your devices, allows you to sync your messages amongst these devices by storing these messages in the cloud. This is not enabled by default, probably because security wise it’s probably safer to not store your messages in the cloud.
In the “Tips” app on my iPhone (which is the user guide app), they explicitly state you have to enable it on all of your devices. You can have some set up to store in the cloud and another device just logged in and storing messages locally. This is to give you the flexibility to store all of your messages long term on one or more devices but not on all of them or in the cloud.
I don’t know about you, but I much prefer the option to store my data where I want rather than to be forced to have it in the cloud (and therefore synced) just because some shitty people are too stupid to know how to cover the evidence of their shitty behavior and want to shift blame to anyone but themselves.
That depends on how well Apple explained the features and behavior, IMHO. A lot of liability issues comes down to what expectations the seller has set for the buyer
It’d be a hard thing to argue in court though that Apple should not consider their users to be borderline competent. Anyone who knows anything about technology should know that when you delete something of the internet it’s never gone forever.
You can still access websites that were taken down in the early 2000s for god’s sake. Why would you assume that a text message being deleted would result in it being irretrievable?
I dont know, the issue reminds me of tech support calls id get back in the day for people who got angry at their ISP when they mixed up IMAP and POP3. Maybe step through exactly how this message service handles copying and deleting before using it to hire prostitutes for years.
You’re out of your mind if you think the regular guy off the street should:
-
Know the difference between IMAP and POP3
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Know the inner workings of iMessage
If Apple requires proof of understanding to sell their tech, they should submit users to a test. Otherwise, their tech should work how the users expect it to. And deleting messages when I press the damn “delete” button is how any sane person expects things to work. Now, if Apple wants to make a copy and store it in their asshole, and I have to penetrate them anally to delete it as well? That’s fucking debatable in court if it’s a reasonable expectation for a user to have.
They explain how this works in their “tips” app - ie the user guide.
You seem to think that because you expect something to work a certain way, everyone does, and that’s just not true at all. For most of the history of iMessage, they were never synced. Eventually they rolled out the option to sync them with iMessage for iCloud. You can choose to use it or not. But I would suggest that just as many people think that deleting a text from one device won’t delete it from the others.
This is not the case of “apple” storing the message anywhere. This is the case of a user storing his messages locally on his Mac and then sharing the account with his wife. He’s clearly an idiot, but sure, blame Apple for not being able to save him from himself.
Should have used Signal.
Signal also has a similar problem. If you choose the “delete for me” option, it only deletes it on one device and leaves it on the others, last time I checked.
He would have to set up disappearing messages aswell.
