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.
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?
The kid is under 5, they’re just curious and like taking pictures. It’s easy to access the camera on my SO’s lock screen.
If it helps, they’re the same gender.
To me gender isn’t isn’t relevant here, even if the kid is way older. The violation of privacy however is.
I don’t recall the age I had to teach my kid not to film me taking a shower or a dump. I believe by the age of 5 they had their own mind when they wanted to be filmed/have their picture taken.
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.
I’m not saying he got hacked or anything, just that iMessage not working as a reasonable person might expect directly led to this problem. So I think the lawsuit is completely valid. I’m guessing he was using a family staring feature or something and deletes were not synced properly.
This person is absolutely an idiot though. Everyone should know to use a non-synced messaging service when doing something you want hidden, like a burner phone or Signal.
