Accounts linked together and we don't want to be!

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Level 1

8 points

Accounts linked together and we don't want to be!

My teen (L) daughter's girlfriend (J) is getting my contact updates on her iPhone; her boyfriend (D) uses one of her old phones and I got some of his photos; I think the girls used my iTunes account 2 years ago and connected us, but can't find setting.

This problem/unwanted sharig began happening a couple of months ago. The boyfriend rarely takes photos, but in early fall I noticed 6 or 7 photos in my camera roll on my iPhone that weren't mine and I traced them to D. J said she had given an older device to D to use. Today J sent me a message that all of my contacts are showing up on her iPhone.

Can't figure out if it is associated with an OS update. She has a separate account and I do too, but the girls used her Dad's iTunes account and my iTunes account to share music. L connected her iPhone to J's family computer a couple of years ago to download music and that is the only time the two accounts mixed as far as I know.

The weird part is that my daughter's phone seems to not be having any issues of receiving or sending shared info or photos. That's why I think the source of the problem is that they logged into my iTunes account and that may now be connected to my iCloud account and it's so messed up I can't see how it can be unravelled without deleting accounts and starting over, but I lose all my files that way.

iPhone 4S

Posted on Jan 1, 2014 4:07 PM

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Answer 1

randers4

Level 9

63,519 points

Jan 1, 2014 6:29 PM in response to castone

It sounds like everyone is sharing the same iCloud account. To fix this, the others (L, J & D) need to delete your account from their devices, migrate a copy of the data to their own separate accounts, then everyone can delete the other's data from their individual accounts.

They should start by saving any photo stream photos that they wish to keep on their device to their camera roll (unless already there) by opening their my photo stream album, tapping Select, tap the photos, tap the share icon (box with upward pointing arrow), then tap Save to Camera Roll. If they are syncing notes with iCloud, they will need to open each of their notes and email them to themselves so they can later copy and paste the text into new notes created in their new account. They should then go to Settings>iCloud, tap Delete Account (which only deletes it from this device, not from iCloud; your device won't be effected by this), choose Keep on My iDevice and provide the password to turn off Find My iPhone when prompted. Then they should sign back in with a different Apple ID to create their new account and choose Merge to upload their data.

Once everyone is on separate accounts, you can each go to icloud.com and delete everyone else's data from your accounts.

The only issue with this is that if they are running iOS 7 with Find My iPhone enabled, in order to delete the existing account they will have to provide the password to do so. If you don't want others (especially J & D) to have your password, you may want to have them do this in your presence so you can enter the password yourself.

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