iPhone
Husband goes to prostitutes, gets caught – and is now suing Apple
The iPhone caught the man cheating – is Apple to blame? (Symbolic image)
© Liubomyr Vorona / Getty Images
A British woman filed for divorce because her husband visited prostitutes. He now blames Apple for this: the deletion of SMS messages was not comprehensible enough.
The smartphone is probably the most personal device that has ever existed. A Brit’s iPhone has now indirectly cost him his marriage: it caught him visiting prostitutes. But the man believes that this is not his fault. He now wants to sue Apple for damages. His accusation is not entirely unfounded.
This is reported by the “Times”. According to some reports, the man, referred to only as Richard by the newspaper, had used the services of prostitutes for several years. He had always deleted the messages arranging the meetings from his iPhone. But they remained on the family iMac. When his wife opened the Messages app there, she found not only the last message he had sent to a prostitute, but also several years of chat histories. She filed for divorce.
No divorce without Apple?
If these mirrored messages had not been sent, Richard argues in his lawsuit, he would still be married. And he is demanding five million pounds in damages from Apple. “It was a pretty brutal way for her to find out,” he argues. Others of his acquaintances had also cheated, including with prostitutes. But their wives forgave them after they admitted it. “I think if I had been able to talk to her rationally, it wouldn’t have been such a brutal realization. I could still be married,” he explains to the “Times.”
In addition to the costs, he justifies the high compensation claim with the consequences of the divorce on his health. He says he had to take beta blockers for his panic attacks and has heart problems due to the stress. “In my opinion, this is all a result of Apple telling me that my messages had been deleted, even though that wasn’t the case.”
The iMessage dilemma
As absurd as the lawsuit seems, the accusation itself is not entirely unfounded: It can actually happen that messages deleted from the iPhone remain on other devices. This is because Apple operates not one, but actually two systems for sending messages in the app of the same name: iMessage and “Messages in iCloud”.
Both look the same at first and function similarly in many ways: Unlike forwarded SMS, they can only be sent and received by Apple devices, are displayed in blue in chats, and are also synchronized on the server, including information about whether the other person has already received and seen them.
However, they differ in terms of deletion: If you delete an iMessage, it only disappears on that device. However, with messages in iCloud, the deletion is also synchronized. If you only let the message disappear on one device, it will no longer be visible on all the others – as long as messages in iCloud are set up there too.
That is exactly what is unlikely to have been the case for Richard: The messages remained on his Mac because he had not activated the function. But the fact that he thought that could also be due to a note from Apple: If you delete a message on a device with messages in iCloud, the app warns that the message will also disappear from all other devices. But that is only true if these have also been activated for the cloud service.
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Class action lawsuit
The divorcee’s lawyers see this as sufficient grounds for a lawsuit. “In many cases, the iPhone informs users that messages have been deleted,” explains lawyer Simon Walton to the “Times.” “But that is misleading because they can still be found on other connected devices – which Apple does not tell its users.”
His law firm is therefore now seeking a class action lawsuit. “If it only affects a few hundred people in Great Britain, we are talking about a billion-dollar lawsuit,” he is convinced. Apple has not yet commented on the allegations. However, on a support page for deleting messages, the company points out that messages can only be deleted on other devices if messages are activated in iCloud – and explains how to set up the function.