Man sues Apple for accidentally exposing his infidelity
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.
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.
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.
WTF?
The kid is under 5, they're just curious and like taking pictures. It's easy to access the camera on my SO's lock screen.
If it helps, they're the same gender.
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, it's a child taking pictures of an adult (the child's biological parent too), not the other way around.
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.
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.
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).
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
^1 232 CLR 138, 188 [170].