Technology

58303 readers

19 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

574

Man sues Apple for accidentally exposing his infidelity (appleinsider.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

134 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

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.