On the one hand, I don’t know that it’s fair to sue a company over your poor understanding of technology, or user error. On the other hand, if he worked for DARPA and was using imessage to talk to his boss or his team about a project that was then leaked or sold by someone living in his home who had access to his home laptop because he didn’t know that the messages he deleted weren’t deleted in real time, and he was fired from his job, that seems like something the company should make very clear when deleting the messages in the first place. A simple warning “Delete this message? Please be aware that deletion is not instantaneously across devices.” Would do.
Incognito mode actually has to tell users that it doesn’t prevent your ISP from seeing what you Google or what websites you visit while using it. They literally had to add a notification so people would know because people didn’t know.
The way iMessage works is really broken. It’s like back in the old days when email was done by POP, so you would have to delete the email separately on both your laptop and your desktop otherwise you’d have inconsistencies.
Apple has never put any effort into it. Virtually every other messaging system is superior. People only used it because SMS was so limited back in the day but now there’s no reason for it to exist.
You can sync your messages by enabling iMessage in iCloud. Or you can just not sign into iMessage on devices that are shared with other people.
It’s not broken, it works this way by design. If you don’t want your messages stored in the cloud, then they aren’t synced. This is a choice that many messaging apps don’t give you.
I’m not aware of the delete label in iMessage being labeled “delete from every device that you own and have signed into iMessage”.
There are numerous documented ways to avoid the situation he put himself in, he didn’t bother to find one and is now trying to blame others for his stupidity.
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
it doesn’t sound ridiculous to me. regardless of the backstory, the issue was that he deleted something and it didn’t work. it could have been a password or picture of his balls or something. Apple should pay up
I dont know, the issue reminds me of tech support calls id get back in the day for people who got angry at their ISP when they mixed up IMAP and POP3. Maybe step through exactly how this message service handles copying and deleting before using it to hire prostitutes for years.
You’re out of your mind if you think the regular guy off the street should:
Know the difference between IMAP and POP3
Know the inner workings of iMessage
If Apple requires proof of understanding to sell their tech, they should submit users to a test. Otherwise, their tech should work how the users expect it to. And deleting messages when I press the damn “delete” button is how any sane person expects things to work. Now, if Apple wants to make a copy and store it in their asshole, and I have to penetrate them anally to delete it as well? That’s fucking debatable in court if it’s a reasonable expectation for a user to have.
They explain how this works in their “tips” app - ie the user guide.
You seem to think that because you expect something to work a certain way, everyone does, and that’s just not true at all. For most of the history of iMessage, they were never synced. Eventually they rolled out the option to sync them with iMessage for iCloud. You can choose to use it or not. But I would suggest that just as many people think that deleting a text from one device won’t delete it from the others.
This is not the case of “apple” storing the message anywhere. This is the case of a user storing his messages locally on his Mac and then sharing the account with his wife. He’s clearly an idiot, but sure, blame Apple for not being able to save him from himself.
No it sounds like he (and you) didn’t understand the technology and thought it acted in a way it didn’t. Expecting Apple to be liable for this is buffoonery.
That depends on how well Apple explained the features and behavior, IMHO. A lot of liability issues comes down to what expectations the seller has set for the buyer
It’d be a hard thing to argue in court though that Apple should not consider their users to be borderline competent. Anyone who knows anything about technology should know that when you delete something of the internet it’s never gone forever.
You can still access websites that were taken down in the early 2000s for god’s sake. Why would you assume that a text message being deleted would result in it being irretrievable?
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.
No, the issue is that he didn’t understand how the technology he was using worked. I mean, one of Apple’s most prevalently advertised features is their product integration, it’s like, their whole deal.
The article tries to say that this is ridiculous, but I don’t see it.
Sure, he’s a cheater, and he got caught. Not particularly sympathetic.
But, Apple markets their products as privacy-respecting, he deleted something he wanted to keep secret, and his Apple products betrayed him and revealed his secret to someone else, resulting in real-world consequences.
Apple should be held to account for the privacy violation at the very least.
Except he used the same account for his prostitute texting device as for the family pc.
It’s simple user error. You can’t have privacy from someone else who shares the same login.
I don’t have any Apple devices so I don’t understand why deleting the message from one device doesn’t delete it from another. What is the point of a sync in that case?
I’m not sure about the specifics in the Apple ecosystem but I imagine it’s like an email address that’s connected as IMAP on one main PC, and as POP3 on your phone.
You can download the mails you need to your phone to read them and answer them on the go.
But the mail server is synched to the PC. So deleting stuff on your phone just deletes the messages on your phone, not on the server and not on the PC.
Nah, it’s more like Dropbox. It’s a multi-way sync between all devices. Dropbox, Google drive and Microsoft one box all have the same kind of problems. Stuff that’s supposed to be deleted ends up not getting deleted, stuff that’s supposed to be overwritten ends up getting multiple copies with conflicts Even though nothing else has any changes staged. It’s totally possible to do it without all that, but there are cost savings are wrapped up in trying to add intelligence in there to make it communicate with the server less.
I don’t really give a rat’s ass about the guy cheating, but if a company is going to drag me into their distributed ecosystem I fully expect deleted things to delete everywhere and stay deleted. This isn’t the first time that they’ve been in the news recently for deleted things reappearing.
Deleting messages from an iPhone WILL delete them from other devices - assuming you’ve opted to let it to do that, and then even still, there may be a delay until the next sync happens.
I’ve deleted messages on my iPhone and they’ll linger on my MacBook for a good while, depending on circumstances. (ie, if the MacBook wasn’t on network when the messages were deleted).
Yep, instant sync is never a guarantee. There still has to be a queue for command messages along with authentication plus authorization of said commands. And just like you said, you must be connected to a network that then can reach their cloud to even receive the command queue.
I run a sync service between multiple Active Directory domains as a result of a merger and the directories haven’t been cutover yet. Along with this sync is a password sync that is normally instant. Most of the times (> 90%), less than a second. Sometimes 3 seconds. Other times? 2 minutes. Even when things are within the same LAN, there’s the possibility of a backed up queue.
So yeah, this is purely on him trusting the sync implicitly and not verifying. In my case, I trust it too but will on occasion have to assist users because it’s not infallible. Karma got him and I have zero sympathy.
I use Apple sync on all my devices including my computer and it does delete from one device to another IF you have sync set up properly. And it’s not instantaneous, it happens when the cloud sync happens. When the computer is off or in sleep, it’s not syncing and once it’s woken up, sometimes it takes a minute to sync up. My guess, it was either not set up right or it hadn’t sync’d yet.
Other possibility, he didn’t know about the deleted folder where deleted messages sit for 30 days unless you clear it (like a computer trash can).
I generally don’t like Apple, but I think crying about privacy violation because someone you’re willingly sharing your account with saw your stuff is not reasonable.
My kid sometimes takes pictures of my SO naked because they know how to access the camera. My SO deletes them as soon as they find them. If those pictures were synced to another computer, the expectation is that those pictures would be deleted from that other computer as well. Not deleting those pictures on the other computer is absolutely a privacy concern.
That’s the case here as well. It’s reasonable to think of iMessage as one blob of data, where deleting from one device deletes all copies from other devices. In Apple jargon, it should “just work.” If it doesn’t “just work” as a reasonable person would expect and that results in damages, I think it’s reasonable for Apple to share in those damages.
It would absolutely be a privacy concern if someone without the rights to access this data could access it from the computer.
My understanding is that it’s the same account logged on both devices. Computers are multi-users devices. No technology ever would protect your secret stuff from someone you’ve just shared your personal account with.
It’s a problem that deletion is not perfectly synchronized, yes. It certainly is a privacy risk because an unauthorized intruder could find them. But in this particular case, there’s no intrusion. The wife just had normal access to these messages in the first place.
I’m not saying he got hacked or anything, just that iMessage not working as a reasonable person might expect directly led to this problem. So I think the lawsuit is completely valid. I’m guessing he was using a family staring feature or something and deletes were not synced properly.
This person is absolutely an idiot though. Everyone should know to use a non-synced messaging service when doing something you want hidden, like a burner phone or Signal.
To me gender isn’t isn’t relevant here, even if the kid is way older. The violation of privacy however is.
I don’t recall the age I had to teach my kid not to film me taking a shower or a dump. I believe by the age of 5 they had their own mind when they wanted to be filmed/have their picture taken.
Just to be clear by the age of 3-4 a child should be aware of the concept of not taking what belongs to others including their pictures.
If your SO was fine with their phone being used to take nudes of them it would not be an issue. However in your 1st comment you state they are not.
The kids is old enough to understand boundaries and the word “no”. If that behavior is limited to your own household then fine you do you. It never is though.
It sounds like you don’t have kids. This is my third, and this point has been different for each. My first was pretty quick (around 3yo), my second was a bit later (around 5 1/2), and this one seems closer to the second than the first.
Understanding “no” and actually obeying are two very different things, and it usually takes 2-3 times before the child understands. The child in question seems to still be learning contexts, as in taking pictures is fine sometimes, but not when someone is getting ready to take a shower. The child doesn’t apparently see “naked person X,” but instead “person X,” so that’s also being learned. Being a child can be confusing.
Fortunately, we don’t have any automatic syncing, so it’s not an issue for us to delete the image and reprimand the child. But it could be an issue for someone else.
It should be very obvious that I have kids just as well as it is obvious that you seem to be outsourcing parenting.
Of course kids are different, that’s true for every living being. Of course setting boundaries is hard, in my observation it requires way more that 2-3 times teaching - sometimes way way more. Especially when it’s an important thing that’s also fun like „don’t run across the (busy) street” or “don’t touch the hot thing” or whatever is going on with your phones.
Then you understand that “don’t take pictures of mommy/daddy naked” isn’t a one-time affair. It happens, we respond to it, and that repeats a few times over the course of weeks or months until the behavior stops. It’s not an everyday thing (we are better stewards of our mobile devices and kids than that), but it happens.
And there are different forms of “no,” there’s the gentle “no” when a child takes a snack just before dinner, and there’s the firm “no” of crossing a street by themselves. The first is way less effective than the second, but if you always use the second, both will be ineffective. Something like taking a picture of a parent naked isn’t an emergency, it’s easily reversible and relies on understanding social norms the child hasn’t encountered (e.g. we’ll shower with young children sometimes, we’ll take them to locker rooms, etc, so there are mixed messages). So we reserve the second for true emergencies, and those lessons are learned quickly.
My point is that children are unpredictable, and often throw an annoying wrench into everyday things. Ideally, amy damage they do is easily reversible, such as deleting that nude picture from a phone a few minutes after being taken.
While I don’t necessarily agree in this case, you did remind me of something Justice Kirby (an Australia Hugh Court (our highest court) Judge) wrote in his dissent in Carr v Western Australia.^1
“He was a smart alec for whom it is hard to feel much sympathy. But the police were public officials bound to comply with the law. We should uphold the appellant’s rights because doing so is an obligation that is precious for everyone. It is cases like this that test this Court. It is no real test to afford the protection of the law to the clearly innocent, the powerful and the acclaimed.”
It depends on how you look at these things. Traditional, fat-client POP3 email was not syncing, it was just downloading from the server. In such a case, I would not expect it to be syncing.
In this particular case, I wouldn’t expect a sync at all. These are messages received on, and managed on, distinct devices.
That said, I did get a MacBook last month and have learned that these things synchronize. Which is cool but I didn’t expect that. Still wouldn’t expect it on deletes.
If someone sends a message to your email address or phone number using iMessage, you receive the message on all your Apple devices that are set up to receive messages sent to that email address or phone number. When you view an iMessage conversation, you see all messages sent from any device, so you can keep in touch with others wherever you are.
The article says nothing about deleted messages, but it does imply that what you see on one device is expected to match what you see on another. So it’s reasonable to think that deleting on one device will delete on another.
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 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.
I found out my ex of 12 years was cheating in a similar matter. For some reason she liked taking screenshot of conversations, I had set up Amazon pictures auto backup on her phone at her request cause she was afraid of losing 16 years of pictures. One day I was looking through the backups cause my phone was also set up and I was looking for an old picture I no longer had on my phone. I ended up finding plenty of screenshot of her texts with an old school boyfriend she had been cheating on me with for almost 2 years. Nothing physical as far as I could tell but I can’t say for certain it didn’t happen, emotional cheating is just as bad for me anyways.
I also saw that some screenshot were from Instagram and I knew her tablet was logged in so I checked and it was all there. Worst part was, that she would often be texting him when we were together doing things and basically telling him she wish she was there. Worst 3 months of my life while I got my ducks in a row so I could leave without issue.
I found out she met him at least twice on her yearly trips back to her home country.
Yea it left me feeling hollow for a while but I’ve found a lovely new girl who respects and appreciates me who I’ve been with for almost 2 years now and she’s also my fiancee.
I chuckled. I think there is deep seated shame of being gay, or soft, in toxic masculinity (and toxic femininity), that people probably go to extremes to hide it. Like being a player, spousal “discipline,” etc. and it gets passed down from generation to generation. But that’s a whole other topic.
He had military benefits to spouses that she would be walking away from. Healthcare, dental, affordable subsidized housing, or housing allowance, less expensive child care, all kinds of things. Being the spouse of a military member is hard, but there’s perks, especially if you have children.
This will be buried but it’s my take on it and whatever…
So I was Army for a while - away from the wife and kid (at the time only one now I’m up to 2 I’m winning life) and it boils down to two separate issues: can the husband deal or the wife.
Men take a ton of shit going through military service so having solid ground back home is like winning the lottery. You never think it’s going to happen, you get excited it might, but it never does. I’m not dogging women in this at all but we are all just humans who want comfort in some way.
So I approach this from the woman’s side. She wants to know that’s her man. Only hers no one else’s. That’s the hero she married and cameras ain’t gonna make a shit stain difference in it. But she’s still scared so she asks for it.
Young men don’t have brains lol. We don’t think we just do. And I approach this with several years of learning from my mistakes. Which this man didn’t have. Yet. Hopefully now he does.
It’s easier to paint the woman the villain for not “supporting the ‘hero’” (yes that’s double quotes cause signing a paper is easy as hell) but to marry someone and just decided to leave… that’s not how the army works or any military branch for that matter.
Sounds to me like the man had a kid, decided that’s not the life he wanted, fucked that life up and here we are. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong but… here we are.
Unveiled at the recent WWDC, iOS 18 includes a much-discussed “hide and lock apps” feature that some worry could be misused for privacy concerns related to infidelity.
Critics have dubbed the new feature “a cheater’s paradise” due to its ability to hide or lock apps on the iPhone home screen, potentially concealing private hobbies and information.
While Apple’s promotion highlights the feature’s ability to safeguard banking apps and prevent unauthorized purchases on Amazon, many users perceive it as facilitating infidelity. The new feature ignited a firestorm on social media, with divided opinions.
“Thanks Apple. I will be trying to hide online dating app from my wife,” one X user shared. “With lock app and hide app, I can finally do it.” Other users joked that the feature “is going to break up relationships.”
Two things can be true lol. He should have insisted on disappearing messages and Signal use for the app but a lot of people are quite resistant to the notion that they don’t get to “keep” your conversations forever for whatever purpose they choose
I was a huge Signal advocate at one time and would try to get everyone to install it and use it. Man, woman or child, I didn’t care who it was. I was worse than a crypto-bro trying to jam BTC down everyone’s throat.
I was chatting with a group of ladies at work and got a few of them to install it. When they did, Signal pushed notifications of them connecting to my wife’s phone.
Needless to say, I got questioned fairly intensely about why there were other girls connecting with me on Signal.
Interesting. I’ve never liked those notifications but I’ve seen people on Signal message boards defend them to the death. There’s no privacy issue! You’re only getting it because they’re already saved in your phone! This is a good scenario to illustrate the point.
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