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.
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?
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’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.
You can “delete for all” since one or two years, but the Standard has long been “deleting from this device only”
IMAP actually deletes an mail for all the clients.
yes, that’s what I wrote.