A British businessman is suing tech giant Apple after his wife found his “deleted” chats to sex workers from his iPhone on another synced device. The man alleged that this is the reason behind his divorce and he would still be married were it not for the company’s lack of transparency over privacy issues.
The man, who was not named in the article first published by The Times newspaper, is middle-aged and was cheating on his wife, turning to prostitutes in the final years of his marriage. His wife also got access to messages from several years ago that he believed he had deleted. He said Apple did not inform its users that deleting a message on one device does not remove it from other linked devices.
According to The Times article, the man would contact sex workers through the iMessage app on his iPhone before deleting the texts. But, these were eventually discovered by his wife on the family’s iMac computer. The man has now filed a lawsuit for £5 million.
“If you are told a message is deleted, you are entitled to believe it’s deleted,” he told The Times. “It’s all quite painful and quite raw still. It was a very brutal way of finding out [for my wife]. My thoughts are if I had been able to talk to her rationally and she had not had such a brutal realisation of it, I might still be married.”
“Divorce is an extraordinarily stressful process and you have children and family dynamics. In my opinion it’s all because Apple told me my messages were deleted when they weren’t. If the message had said, ‘These messages are deleted on this device’, that would have been a clue, or ‘These messages are deleted on this device only’ that would have been even better,” he was quoted as saying.
The family devices were synced using the same Apple ID, which led to the discovery. The man’s divorce has cost him more than £5 million and, hence, he is seeking to turn his lawsuit into a class-action suit for those who might have faced similar situations.
His lawyer Simon Walton told The Telegraph, “Apple had not been clear with users as to what happens to messages they send and receive and, importantly, delete.”
He said Apple informs an iPhone user that their messages have been deleted from the messaging app, when, in fact, this is not the case. This is “misleading because they are still found on other linked devices – something Apple doesn’t tell its users”, he added.
Comments
0 comment