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.
On the one hand, I don’t know that it’s fair to sue a company over your poor understanding of technology, or user error. On the other hand, if he worked for DARPA and was using imessage to talk to his boss or his team about a project that was then leaked or sold by someone living in his home who had access to his home laptop because he didn’t know that the messages he deleted weren’t deleted in real time, and he was fired from his job, that seems like something the company should make very clear when deleting the messages in the first place. A simple warning “Delete this message? Please be aware that deletion is not instantaneously across devices.” Would do.
Incognito mode actually has to tell users that it doesn’t prevent your ISP from seeing what you Google or what websites you visit while using it. They literally had to add a notification so people would know because people didn’t know.
The way iMessage works is really broken. It’s like back in the old days when email was done by POP, so you would have to delete the email separately on both your laptop and your desktop otherwise you’d have inconsistencies.
Apple has never put any effort into it. Virtually every other messaging system is superior. People only used it because SMS was so limited back in the day but now there’s no reason for it to exist.
You can sync your messages by enabling iMessage in iCloud. Or you can just not sign into iMessage on devices that are shared with other people.
It’s not broken, it works this way by design. If you don’t want your messages stored in the cloud, then they aren’t synced. This is a choice that many messaging apps don’t give you.