Apple ‘leaks’ husband's private chat with sex worker to wife, gets sued for ₹53 crore

A man is blaming Apple for his divorce. He is now suing the company after his wife found deleted messages on a linked computer. These messages revealed he had been arranging meetings with prostitutes, The Times reported.

The man admitted to seeing sex workers in the final years of his marriage, arranging meetings through iMessage. He deleted the messages, thinking this would hide his infidelity.

The businessman is suing Apple for nearly ₹53 crore (over £5 million), claiming it does not inform customers that deleted messages can still appear on other Apple devices.

When his wife opened the app on their iMac, she saw that his last message to another person’s iPhone was to a sex worker. She then found several years' worth of supposedly-deleted messages to prostitutes, the publication added.

If someone is told a message is deleted, they are entitled to believe it is deleted, he told the newspaper. He mentioned that, for his wife, it was a brutal way to find out what he had been up to.

The man reflected that, if he had been able to talk to her rationally and she had not experienced such a “brutal realisation”, he might still be married.

According to him, divorce is an “extraordinarily-stressful process”, especially when children and family dynamics involved. In his opinion, it all happened because Apple told him his messages were deleted when they weren't. He remarked that a message indicating those messages were deleted on that device would have provided a clue.

‘Apple doesn’t tell its users’

Simon Walton is from the London law firm Rosenblatt, representing the man suing Apple.

“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 told the Telegraph.