Apple is always trying to make its different products work well together. Indeed, one of the marquee features of iOS 8 is continuity, which lets you, for example, answer a call placed to your iPhone from your computer or iPad, and lets you handoff an email or a website from one device to another. But some folks might not want their Apple products cooperating quite so much. While I bring my iPad back and forth to work every day, so it is always with me, I know many attorneys who often leave their iPads at home. And even if your iPad is always with you, you may not be the sole user — for example, you may let your kids use it on the weekends to play a game.
While talking to another lawyer last week, who will remain anonymous, I was reminded that the cooperation between your Apple devices might be a bad thing if you are not the only one using your devices. This lawyer often leaves his iPad at home, and his kids sometimes use it after school. But his iPad is also signed in to his Messages account, which means that if someone sends him a text message while he is at work, that message appears on not only his iPhone, but also his iPad. (And it can be responded to from either device.) As a result, he learned that text messages sent to him that were intended only for his eyes were also showing up on his iPad at home, while it was being used by his son. Whoops.
If you want to limit your text messages to your iPhone because others have access to your iPad, there are a few ways to do so.
In the Settings app on your iPad, if you select Messages on the left, you will see several options on the right. The first one is an on/off switch. If you turn that off, new texts will not appear on your iPad. When you want to start seeing texts again, just turn the switch on.
That's a quick solution, but it requires you to remember to turn the switch on and off again. Also, if anyone using your iPad happened to flip the switch, they could start seeing your texts too.
Another solution is to sign out of your iMessages account. To do so, once again open the Settings app and go to Messages, but this time tap the Send & Receive option. On the next screen, your Apple ID is shown at the top — tap it. This brings up a window that gives you four options, the last option of which is Sign Out. Once you select this, your iPad will stop receiving messages, and the only way that anyone can get them to start showing up again is to log back in using your Apple ID username and password — and when they do so, you will get alerts on your other devices, such as your iPhone, that your iPad is now using your account to get messages.
Note, however, that anyone with access to your iPad can still open your Messages app and read your old texts, even if you have stopped new texts from coming in. If you don't want that to happen, go to the Messages app, tap Edit at the top left, and then select each of your prior conversations and then tap delete at the bottom. In my tests, this only deleted conversations on the iPad and did not also delete the conversations on my iPhone.
Of course, if you are going to this extreme to protect the confidentiality of your texts, remember that anyone using your iPad can also access other sensitive information. If you are logged in to email on your iPad, they can read your emails. If you have privileged and confidential documents in your GoodReader or your Word apps, they can read that.
For years, I have heard people say that they want a way to have multiple users on an iPad, much as you can do on a Mac or PC, so that multiple people can log in and log out on the same iPad without seeing the documents and information that belongs to someone else. Apple has never implemented this feature, and I'm not sure that they ever will.
Perhaps the only true solution is to use my approach: don't let anyone else have access to your iPad. Over the years, I have upgraded to newer iPad models, which means that we have an older iPad 2 and iPad 3 in my house that we now let our kids use, during appropriate times during the week. Those iPads don't have access to my text messages, my emails, my documents, etc. and instead both are loaded up with educational and game apps that my kids like to use.
When my kids get older, I know that they are other issues that I will have to think about such as their ability to access the dark corners of the Internet in the Safari app. For now, I have turned off access to Safari and certain other apps by opening the Settings app and going to General -> Restrictions -> Enable Restrictions, where you can selectively turn on or off apps like Safari, FaceTime, and Siri. Having said that, I know that there will come a time in the future when they have a legitimate need to do research on the Internet using the Safari app, and then I'll have to open up that can of worms.
Whatever approach you take, just make sure that it is a conscious one that you thought about beforehand. Otherwise, you might think that you are texting in private with your spouse or someone else, only to learn afterwards that you were not so private after all.
