Why Apple cannot unlock your deceased relative’s iPhone

Source Domain: www.cultofmac.com

A very sad day has come, and a beloved relative has passed away. And it seems Apple is making the experience worse because it refuses to unlock the deceased person’s iPhone!

It’s not that Apple refuses to — it literally cannot. And it all comes down to the way encryption works.

Fortunately, there’s a simple way to prevent this problem. It just takes some preparation.

The reason Apple cannot unlock a deceased person’s iPhone

Consider this typical scenario. Grandma passes away, and now the family wants the many pictures of the grandkids from her iPhone. The device is locked, so someone goes to Apple with the death certificate and asks for the passcode, or simply to have the device unlocked.

Apple says no, and the family is outraged. They aren’t thieves — they just want access to a handset they own.

To get why Apple is powerless to help, it’s important to understand that the contents of the iPhone are encrypted, and Apple doesn’t keep a key to unlock it. That’s because the company treats privacy as a fundamental human right.

An iPhone passcode is far more secure than any door lock

People tend to think of a passcode like a door key. It’s not — iPhone security doesn’t work anything like a lock on your house. Instead, locking your iPhone is the equivalent of putting everything in your house through a woodchipper, then immediately reassembling it all when you unlock the door. See? The metaphor completely fails.

That’s because iPhones use strong, device-based encryption. This scrambles everything — photos, messages, contacts — so it looks like complete nonsense, not readable text or images. The only way to restore the data is by unencrypting it, and that requires the passcode.

When a user sets their iPhone passcode, it becomes part of the encryption key that protects all the data on the device. Without the passcode, the data can’t be unscrambled.

The important part is this: Apple does not store a copy of your passcode or the…

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