Apple has received another request to unlock an iPhone, this time from a grieving father in Italy.
The tech giant has been confronting legal challenges from the FBI over its refusal to unlock the iPhone belonging to a man responsible for the San Bernardino terror attack. Now an Italian man has written to Apple asking the company to unlock his dead son’s iPhone so that he can retrieve photos, according to AFP.
Dead son’s photos locked on Apple iPhone 6
Leonardo Fabbretti wrote a letter to Apple chief executive Tim Cook imploring him to allow access to the photos. If Cook does not grant his request, Fabbretti said that he would turn to the same Israeli mobile forensics firm that reportedly helped the FBI.
“Don’t deny me the memories of my son,” architect Fabbretti wrote. He adopted his son Dama from Ethiopia in 2007, before the young boy was diagnosed with bone cancer in 2013 following a skiing accident. Dama died in September aged 13 after chemotherapy and operations failed to save his life.
“I cannot give up. Having lost my Dama, I will fight to have the last two months of photos, thoughts and words which are held hostage in his phone,” he said in the letter, sent on 21 March.
“I think what’s happened should make you think about the privacy policy adopted by your company. Although I share your philosophy in general, I think Apple should offer solutions for exceptional cases like mine.”
Italian architect begs Apple to unlock phone
Fabbretti gave Dama an iPhone 6 around 9 months before he passed away, and the boy apparently used it all the time. “He wanted me to have access, he added my fingerprint ID,” he told AFP. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t work if the phone is turned off and on again.”
Fabbretti lives near Perugia in central Italy and said that mobile forensics firm Cellebrite has offered to crack Dama’s iPhone for free. The company claims that it can gain access to locked Apple devices.
The architect said that even if Apple did not help him get the photographs from the phone, he hoped the company would make a donation to a charity in Ethiopia or set up a grant for researchers looking into privacy issues.
