A grieving father in Italy is appealing to Apple CEO Tim Cook to help him unlock his dead son's iPhone so he can retrieve photographs documenting the last few months of the teenager's life.
"Don't deny me the memories of my son," beseeched Leonardo Fabbretti in a 21 March letter to Cook, shared by AFP.
Fabbretti adopted his son, Dama, from Ethiopia in 2007. Dama was diagnosed with bone cancer in 2013, and passed away in September 2015, at the age of 13, despite attempts to cure him through chemotherapy and a number of surgeries.
"I had given my son an iPhone 6 nearly nine months before his death, which he used all the time. He wanted me to have access, he added my fingerprint ID... unfortunately, it doesn't work if the phone is turned off and on again," Fabbretti told AFP.
"I will fight to have the last two months of photos, thoughts and words which are held hostage on his phone," he said in his letter to Cook, adding that "although I share [Apple's] philosophy in general, I think Apple should offer solutions for exceptional cases like mine".
Fabbretti has been attempting to have Dama's iPhone unlocked since the month after his death. According to AFP, he contacted Apple Europe in October 2015, and was told by its technical team that it could not unlock the phone.
Yet the mourning father has other means to unlock the device if its manufacturer refuses to help him.
Fabbretti says Cellebrite, the mobile forensics firm that worked with the FBI to unlock the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, had offered to try to unlock Dama's phone for free.
Back doors for sale
Fabbretti's quest to access memories of his son has put a new spin on current debates about user privacy in the wake of the FBI's demands that Apple help it unlock an iPhone that belonged to Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters.
Apple has repeatedly underlined its refusal to create a "back door" to its devices, explaining that hacking its own software to create a pathway into locked devices could threaten the safety of all Apple users. "No one should have a key that turns a billion locks," Cook has said on the matter.
Although Fabbretti's intentions are not malicious - his son attempted to give his father access to his phone - Cellebrite's offer of assistance demonstrates that its forced entry into Farook's iPhone has in fact created a back door that can be used on other iPhones.
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