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.
Does Apple have actual instructions and documentation that explains this? I honestly didn’t know, as I’ve never used iMessage.
Yes, they do.
This article is short on details but basically the situation is that for most of the lifetime of iMessage, you sign in with your Mac and your phone and your iPad and whatever. These messages are not synced. If you sign in on a new device, the old one’s don’t show up. If you delete from one device it has no affect on the other.
Later they introduced iMessage in iCloud , which is an opt in service. iMessage in iCloud, once set up on your devices, allows you to sync your messages amongst these devices by storing these messages in the cloud. This is not enabled by default, probably because security wise it’s probably safer to not store your messages in the cloud.
In the “Tips” app on my iPhone (which is the user guide app), they explicitly state you have to enable it on all of your devices. You can have some set up to store in the cloud and another device just logged in and storing messages locally. This is to give you the flexibility to store all of your messages long term on one or more devices but not on all of them or in the cloud.
I don’t know about you, but I much prefer the option to store my data where I want rather than to be forced to have it in the cloud (and therefore synced) just because some shitty people are too stupid to know how to cover the evidence of their shitty behavior and want to shift blame to anyone but themselves.