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.

Comments

Sorry, no exceptions to mathematics.

[danaris]

"Boo hoo, my emotions are more important than the whole world's privacy."

Sorry, there is literally no way for Apple to build into a phone or an OS a way to unlock it for situations like this that won't also be vulnerable to governments and hackers.

If you never see your son's photos, that will be sad for you.

If Apple actually makes the changes required to make it possible for people like you to get in to phones like these regularly, that will be devastating for all iPhone users everywhere.

Dan Aris

Re:Sorry, no exceptions to mathematics.

[plover]

Sure there's a way. The owner of the phone could voluntarily use an Apple-provided key escrow service. If you buy an iPhone for your son, register a recovery key with Apple. If you buy iPhones for your employees, keep a recovery key for your company. If you buy an iPhone for yourself, and don't want a recovery key, don't register one; but don't cry to Apple if you lose your passcode.

If the police have a warrant, they can demand the escrowed password, if one exists, because it's no longer 'personal' once it's shared. That's part of the conditions of using an escrow service.

Does that make the escrow service a giant target for hackers and the NSA? Sure. Want to avoid that risk? Don't escrow your password. Your choice.

Re:Sorry, no exceptions to mathematics.

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, you don't understand what's going on here, but would rather post bullshit than educate yourself.

You can't crack one phone and restrict the crack to that phone. Any technique or tool that works on one phone will work on all phones running the same hardware/software environment.

Secondly, we have nothing against that. We do have something against backdoors and weaknesses being introduced or perpetuated to facilitate such cracking activities.

Lastly, you're an idiot, a 3rd party company doesn't control the security of the platform. There's a huge conflict of interest involved when you're both responsible for securing the device and responsible for cracking it on demand. Having 3rd party do the cracking is the best possible compromise as it doesn't impair the patches and security updates and represents no conflict of interest.

Like I said, educate yourself, because you're making yourself look like a fucking dumb ass.

Re:Sorry, no exceptions to mathematics.

[Pieroxy]

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 ?

This, even with this whopper of a fallacy

[s.petry]

First, my condolences to the father. My kid is in college now, but I would have taken his phone away if he locked me out of it. Why? Trust is always a two way street. Sadly many people neglect that fact, which results in issues like TFA is appealing and a massive amount of social problems. Your kid giving you the password does not indicate that you have to use it, and in a healthy relationship the parent would not even have to ask. The parent not using the password to snoop is the opposite direction on that two way street. Parents need to learn that lesson, or continue down the same old path of "I can't access my kids phone after something happened to them.", and "I never knew my kid was on drugs.", and "I never knew they were seeing an older person which led to something bad.", etc.. etc.. you get the point.

The reason I called this a whopper of a fallacy is that it's an appeal to emotion on a massive scale (child, death, personal loss, disease). No matter how many appeals to emotion you stack up, it's still an appeal to emotion and fallacious argument.

The fact that this massive appeal comes from an adult reeks of propaganda. Adults are often foolish enough to attempt to use an appeal, but media is usually better about not using them when they are so obvious. If it's a legit person and request, I can hope that they learn to rationalize their thoughts and then teach others to do the same.

Re:Apple needs to stand up to the FBI...

[TheGratefulNet]

if the kid, knowing he was going to die soon, did not export or 'share' his photos, why do you think the father has as right to them?

this was not a sudden car crash. they knew this was going to happen and the father did not get the son to open his phone for him, to at least send over the things that -should- be shared?

how is this a problem that should be solved by the world; and not a parent-and-son-ONLY problem?

we feel for you. but asking now is, well, a bit of poor planning. and no, the world does not just simply weaken its security because of emotional appeals.

the 'patriot act' was done 100% on emotional apppeal, and look where THAT got us! nothing good came from patriot act. and nothing good EVER comes from laws or policies based on pure emotion.