A middle-aged businessman from England is suing Apple, claiming that the company’s failure to properly delete messages from all devices led to the discovery of incriminating texts by his wife, resulting in a costly divorce.
The man, who remains anonymous, claims that Apple’s lack of transparency regarding the deletion of iMessages has caused him significant personal and financial distress.
The businessman confided to The Times that he had resorted to contacting sex workers via the iMessage app during the latter years of his marriage.
Believing that deleting the messages from his iPhone would permanently remove them, he was shocked when his wife found the texts on the family’s iMac computer. The messages, dating back several years, were uncovered despite his attempts to erase them.
“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.”
The businessman is now pursuing legal action against Apple, seeking compensation for the more than £5 million he lost in the divorce and associated legal costs. He argues that Apple misled him about the status of deleted messages, leading to the unintended exposure of his private communications.
“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 added.
Simon Walton, from the London law firm Rosenblatt which is representing the businessman, told The Telegraph, “Apple had not been clear with users as to what happens to messages they send and receive and, importantly, delete. In many cases, the iPhone informs the user that messages have been deleted but, as we have seen, that isn’t true and is misleading because they are still found on other linked devices — something Apple doesn’t tell its users.”
Walton further expressed his interest in hearing from other Apple customers who may have experienced similar issues, hinting at the potential for a broader legal challenge against the tech giant.
As the case unfolds, it raises important questions about data privacy and the responsibilities of technology companies to clearly communicate how data is managed across multiple devices.
