It’s kinda bs too sometimes. My sister recently went through a divorce and now her ex and his new baby mama are in a group chat with her on iMessage to coordinate things like handing off the kid on weekends and holidays, general medical stuff, etc. Recently they were gaslighting her and harassing her because she refused to do something for them that was not in the custody agreement and the new girl sent some nasty messages… Then deleted them.

I told her then she needed to update her phone settings to disable iMessage with them so that SMS actually keeps a written record when they decide to harass her like that in the future. You can’t delete that. Also, the carrier can pull up SMS records if you need to report something to the police, but iMessage is encrypted so I’m not sure Apple could do the same even if they wanted to. You can also set iMessage to indefinitely share your location with someone, so I showed her how to check that that was off. And if she shared any sensitive info through iMessage like SSNs there’s a whole process to delete those from iCloud so that’s not a risk if it ever gets hacked again (like it was in 2014).

Apple has some convenient features, but if you aren’t that tech savvy, you open yourself up to all kinds of issues.