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 know this wasn’t iMessage per se (altho its par for the course for that curs-ed app) but this serves as a good reminder for posterity.
Its actually one of the issues with iCloud and the signin process because if you do the normal thing trying to sign into your account anywhere outside of AppStore, it automaticaly opts you in to iCloud and its showtime for all your data in terms of transit and restoring it and activating all of the crappy, leaky things like iMessage and Backup in addition to all 500+ apps you have that automatically synced themself the moment you opened and all times you used them if you didn’t de-toggle and delete whatever it shared up to that point
Isn’t messages in iCloud off by default? I feel like I had to actively enable this in a preference panel.
You are mistaken at least as of the present and even a while back. They reset all defaults everytime you log into iCloud, its likely an attempt to discourage logging out