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.
Signal also has a similar problem. If you choose the “delete for me” option, it only deletes it on one device and leaves it on the others, last time I checked.
He would have to set up disappearing messages aswell.
I meant because it does not sync between different devices.
I think there is a three hour window where you can delete for all.
You can only do that for your own messages though. I’m guessing the messages from the prostitutes would be more than enough for the wife to notice.
Also I think the window is longer than 3 hours. Maybe a day?
Yup, something that’s not synced to family computers. That’s basically the first rule of opsec.
Apple could still be at fault here, but you never trust a single service to maintain your privacy, you have multiple layers protecting you.