I had a pretty wildly abusive person in my life who performed a lot of physical, mental, and sexual abuse on me when I was a kid. I am no-contact with her, including read receipts.

But I don't keep her blocked, as she's sent me threats through texts before, telling me she's going to come to my house or tell my employers I'm a hacker or that she knows where I live, etc. I want to have access to those in case I need to action on them, or in case they're useful in a legal context.

I enabled iMessage, despite hating iMessage being a profitable tool of class warfare and a being a sluggish piece of horseshit. But (1) it has a better security stance than SMS and I'd rather someone message me with it than SMS, but also (2) some businesses use it for arbitration opt out clauses and those are easier than sending physical letters.

Here's the bad thing: Apple's iMessage has, apparently, started sending read receipts to some people. I have read receipts disabled, and individually as well. This abusive person has gotten a read receipt and is going ham with it.

This is such a basic, crucial feature to get right. If read receipts are disabled, then read receipts should never be sent. I'm angry and I feel sick. I've never been burned like this by a piece of open source software.

Sure enough, I search this up, and plenty of other people are having the same problem.

Even worse, some time after I had it disabled, Apple has reenabled Name and Photo sharing with contacts. This is kind of mind blowing. Why would Apple override this setting having had been disabled? That's absolutely insane, right?

Another bug I'm uncovering as I write this is, if you remove sharing your photo and name, it seems simply not to work when you try to change it. It seems to be an untested workflow-- Apple has never considered that anyone would ever have that disabled. I've ran into a number of broken workflows with iCloud disabled but this one is so stupid.

What the fuck, Apple? These are things that should never happen under any circumstances.