Imagine deleting some messages from your phone, and feeling relieved that those conversations are gone forever. But what if those messages aren’t really gone? That’s exactly what happened to a man in the UK, whose deleted chats with an alleged sex worker were discovered by his wife. The shocking revelation led to a divorce and he is now taking legal action against Apple, claiming a major flaw in its security and privacy features. It’s a frightening reminder that our digital secrets may not be as safe as we think. Remarkably, Apple recently fixed a bug that brought back users’ deleted photos.

According to a report in The Times, the man, who asked not to be named, used iMessages to communicate with sex workers. He claimed he had deleted the messages from his iMessage app on his phone, but later discovered that the deleted messages were still accessible on the family’s iMac due to synchronization between Apple devices – a feature that had seemed beneficial until now. He alleged that Apple did not tell users that deleting messages from one synced device would not delete them from other synced devices.

He told the publication, “If you are told a message has been deleted, you have a right to assume it has been deleted.” The man’s wife found the messages and decided to file for divorce, which cost her more than £5 million, The Times reports. He called the divorce “painful and raw”, suggesting that more sensible conversations could have saved their marriage if the messages had not been discovered so dramatically.

In the man’s case, it didn’t end there. His wife read the messages and filed for divorce, costing him a lot of money. He described the divorce as “painful and cruel,” suggesting that a more sensible conversation might have saved his marriage if the messages hadn’t been revealed in such a dramatic way. “If I had been able to talk to her in a rational way and she wouldn’t have realized it in such a cruel way, I would probably still be married,” he explained. “It was a very cruel way to find out,” he said.

“In my opinion, all of this happened because Apple told me my messages had been deleted, when they weren’t. If the message had said, ‘These messages have been deleted on this device’, that would have been a clue, or ‘These messages have only been deleted on this device’ it would have been even better,” he said. The man sued Apple for £5 million and is now turning his lawsuit into a class action lawsuit for people who may have faced a similar problem.