this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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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.

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[–] deranger@sh.itjust.works 37 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (22 children)

All he had to do was put his wife on a different account on the Mac or use another messenger on his phone. I don’t see iMessage as being “leaky” in this instance. His messages didn’t appear anywhere they weren’t supposed to from a technical perspective. He used the same account on the Mac and iPhone, syncing messages worked as advertised. I’d expect this to happen with any message sync feature, it’s not iMessage specific.

It’s like complaining that your wife found out your were cheating because you used FB messenger, yet didn’t create a separate login for your wife on your Linux desktop, and the sole account’s web browser is logged in to your Facebook. He fucked up, that’s poor computer security to let someone else use your account. A major Mac feature is a lot of activity is easily shared across devices you’re logged into. Photos, messages, calendar, reminders, all sorts of things. This tells me to be careful where I log in with my iCloud account and who uses it. Why would you not have a separate login for your wife, especially if you’re fucking around on her and she regularly uses that computer?

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 51 points 4 months ago (8 children)

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.works 16 points 4 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] Tenthrow@lemmy.world 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

And it would definitely be SMS if the prostitutes were using Android.

[–] disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months 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.

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