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Grieving Father is Begging Apple to Unlock His Dead Son's iPhone (mirror.co.uk)
"A grieving father is begging Apple to allow him access to the photos stored on his dead son's iPhone," reports Time. In September Leonardo Fabbretti's adopted son died of bone cancer at age 13, and the father believes that two months of photographs are still stored on his son's iPhone. Last fall Apple staff attempted to retrieve the photos from their cloud-storage service, but the iPhone hadn't been synced before the 13-year-old's death. "Don't deny me the memories of my son," the father writes in a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook.
The father's letter tells Apple that "Although I share your philosophy in general, I think Apple should offer solutions for exceptional cases like mine," according to a British newspaper, while 88% of respondents in their online poll believed that Apple should unlock the phone.
I'm curious why it didn't occur to him to have the phone unlocked before the sons death. It sounds like the child was terminally ill for all of that time.
I can feel for him, but why should the rest of the iPhone users suffer because the teen didn't have the files backed up to the cloud and left the phone locked. AFAIK, the iPhone just defaults to encryption, it doesn't require it and it certainly doesn't prevent you from writing the password down.
Part of estate planning in the 21st century is making sure that things like that are available to those that need them.
You could also give your Dad the code to your iPhone, specially when you're fighting cancer and could die literally any minute.
If he didn't do it, it *might* be because he wouldn't have wanted his dad anywhere near his phone. But we'll never know now, will we ?
Write boring code, not shiny code!