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.
Should have used Signal.
If I have multiple devices synced, and I delete something from one of them, it’s not unreasonable to think it should be deleted from all of them.
For example, a shared calendar item on my phone, tablet and laptop. If I delete it on one, it should be deleted from all of them.
If Apple synced the messages, but not the delete operation, yeah… that’s a problem.
But it’s also on the guy for setting up/not disabling sharing in the first place.
I knew a guy when I served in the US military who got caught cheating in a semi-related way. He got assigned to a base in a new state and his wife refused to relocate their whole family for the few years he’d be assigned there, so he went by himself, leaving his wife and kids in his home state.
Turns out, he was sexting one of his younger subordinates at work. One of his daughters found out when she tried to use an old tablet and found out his account was still synced to it. She saw all his texts updating in real time.
He was ultra-conservative and didn’t believe in divorce, so he was doing everything he could to save his marriage. His wife forced him to install security cameras in every room of his apartment and banned him from going anywhere after work. She knew his schedule and expected him home immediately after work ended. He was basically on house arrest until his job was done and he could move home.
The last I heard, he told his wife the landlord needed to paint the walls, so he removed all the cameras, dunked them in the bathtub, then played dumb when none of them would work when he set them back up again. He was seen inviting young women over to his apartment after that. So, you know… he didn’t learn his lesson.
His wife forced him to install security cameras in every room of his apartment and banned him from going anywhere after work. She knew his schedule and expected him home immediately after work ended.
This is so toxic. Not saying cheaters get what they deserve but if you can’t trust your husband, I think you have bigger problems than infidelity.
Divorce is sin, side chicks are fine. Got it.
a man referred to as “Richard”
Heh.
Such a Richard move
As the British have discovered, if infidelity occurs, it’s the phone makers fault.
Guy shoulda used Signal
I know this wasn’t iMessage per se (altho its par for the course for that curs-ed app) but this serves as a good reminder for posterity.
Its actually one of the issues with iCloud and the signin process because if you do the normal thing trying to sign into your account anywhere outside of AppStore, it automaticaly opts you in to iCloud and its showtime for all your data in terms of transit and restoring it and activating all of the crappy, leaky things like iMessage and Backup in addition to all 500+ apps you have that automatically synced themself the moment you opened and all times you used them if you didn’t de-toggle and delete whatever it shared up to that point
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?
I don’t like apple either, but in this case you’re right. I have signal on my phone and on my linux machines, if I share those computers with someone else and let them use the same user, they can open signal and see my messages. The guy in the article is an idiot.
Declaring it a “very brutal way” for his wife to find out, he believes that there could’ve been a chance of the marriage continuing had he been able to “talk to her rationally.”
I’m not sure if he means he could continue his behaviour without being caught or if he planned on lying and saying it was a one time thing. Either way I highly doubt he had any plans to be honest.
The “talk to her rationally” bit is hilarious. Yes I’ve been expensively unfaithful, have possibly been exposing you to a number of diseases without your knowledge, and have been physically unavailable regularly for years. What self respecting person wouldn’t “rationally” see that as perfectly acceptable! /s
What an idiot on multiple accounts.
No that’s the problem, he was an idiot with a single account.
