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.

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.

  • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
    531·
    14 days ago

    Guy’s an idiot for sure, but I would expect a delete action to sync as well. Why does a creation sync but not a deletion?

    • deranger@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      17·
      14 days ago

      Good question. It should sync deletes per their support article, and that’s my experience with iMessages. Wonder if this was an SMS conversation and it only delivers to multiple devices, but doesn’t actually sync SMS like it does iMessages.

      If you use Messages in iCloud, deleting a message or conversation on your Mac deletes it from all your devices where Messages in iCloud is on.

      https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/iphone/iph2c9c4bfcb/ios

      • Revan343@lemmy.caEnglish
        8·
        14 days ago

        If you use Messages in iCloud, deleting a message or conversation on your Mac deletes it from all your devices where Messages in iCloud is on.

        Technically that doesn’t say that deleting them from your phone will delete it from the backup on your Mac

        • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          14 days ago

          SMS forwards and syncs through the Messages app if you enable it in iCloud. If he was getting the “Sign into iCloud” prompt to reauthenticate his Mac any point in time after the message was synced, and they were just hitting cancel, it would suspend sync and deletion.

    • Fisch@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      121·
      14 days ago

      I think that’s the one thing Apple did wrong here. The way it seems to work currently, I would have to manually delete the same message from each device one after another. That’s stupid.

    • Maeve@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      24·
      14 days ago

      Because it deleted from the cloud, the synced message is already on the device. Once there’s a digital copy, it’s like a carbon physical copy. Just because you shred the white and yellow copy doesn’t mean you’ve shredded the yellow copy in the file cabinet you forgot about.