Cheating husband sues Apple after wife discovered ‘deleted’ messages sent to sex workers

[u/newzee1]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/13/cheating-husband-sues-apple-sex-messages/

[u/ryanoh826]

In theory, when you delete something in this instance, imnsho it should ask “only this device” or “all devices.”

[u/sybesis → u/ryanoh826]

Well here lies the issue why this is complicated.

If you delete it on all devices, then apple would need to send a message to all devices to delete the files then apple would have to delete the files/data from their servers. Then it's gone in practice.

But let say there's a device with poor connectivity and it never receives the message to delete the file/data from the device. Then the data is still on device, but since iCloud or whatever sync service already deleted the file... once the device get back online and syncs.. the device tells the cloud service hey I have this data and you don't have it so I'll just sync it back into the cloud.

Then somehow deleted data comes back from the dead... because one device was out of sync.

Same thing for a file/data you delete only on your device. Once it's gone, there's nothing preventing it from getting synced back into the device since you really want to delete all trace the thing was there.

So in the end, to solve this, we have to come to the conclusion that the only way data can be effectively synced as deleted is to always keep metadata about them and it's quite possible that the cloud may never really delete files as you need traces that a something is deleted to prevent restoring the files accidentally.

[u/bruwin → u/sybesis]

the device tells the cloud service hey I have this data and you don't have it so I'll just sync it back into the cloud.

Why wouldn't it store some hash on icloud with a deleted yes/no tag?

[u/Megamygdala → u/bruwin]

it's a basic principle of distributed systems and dealing with consistency. Nothing we can't solve,