HT4865 So who believes Apple should be a bit more cautionary about the sharing of iMessages and other content when several members of a family share the same iCloud account and unknowing can audit each other's iMessages, Contacts, and god only knows what

Question

I think Apple should be a bit more cautionary about iCloud and privacy.  My family shares the same iCloud account as we all enjoy the music we collectively purchase on iTunes; we paid Apple for this feature with some kind of grouped account.  We didn't know, however that this joins our devices so that iMessages, contacts, pictures and just about everything else is shared too.  The unprivate default seems to be to share everything between all devices vs. to allow access by exception or by choice (or by password?).  Sure, when my kids get all my texts I can go figure out why and fix it but that is in my mind the antithesis of privacy and could be quite embarrassing for any family.  I guess it is good for stalking the kids or parents though if they don't know about the partyline approach to privacy.  Maybe a tech solution would be to have the iPhone show somehow the extent of its audience to its user.

Answer 1

No argument from me about the vagaries of using and sharing Apple IDs.  This can lead to unintended consequences, especially in a family situation.
If you're sharing the same ID for FaceTime, you might want to go to Settings>FaceTime, tap the ID, sign out, then sign in with separate IDs there too.  Otherwise, you'll end up getting each other's FaceTime calls.
Also, if you need to migrate everyone's devices to separate iCloud accounts to keep your synced data separated, you can do this by saving any photo stream photos you wish to keep to your camera roll (unless already there) by opening your my photo stream album, tapping Select, tapping the photos, tap the share icon (box with upward facing arrow), then tapping Save to Camera Roll.  If you are syncing notes with iCloud, you'll need to open each of your notes and email them to yourself so you can later copy and paste the text into new notes created in your new account.  Then go to Settings>iCloud, tap Delete Account (which only deletes it from this device, not from iCloud), choose Keep on My iDevice and provide the password to turn off Find My iPhone.  Then sign back in with a different Apple ID to create your new account and choose Merge to upload your data.  Once everyone's devices are on separate accounts, you can go to icloud.com and delete each other's data from your accounts.