I tried as well and mine worked too.

Granted, I had the iPhone app open and then opened the Watch app right after and it worked.

Maybe try force closing the Watch app (double tap side button and then swipe it away) and then try reopening with the iPhone app open.

This is the start of some nasty privacy violating shit. But the average people are going to eat it because of convenience and then wonder why shit keeps getting worse for their privacy.

Try the “forgot your password” link on his iCloud account. When you go to iCloud.com, there’s a link there for it. There might be some way that you can reset the iCloud account and get in that way. Most of these methods have you verify you own the account like a link in an email or text to the phone or something. Worth a try to see especially since you physically have the phone.

If he left his iPhone with the messages showing on the screen even when locked, you may be lucky and get to send a text to the phone and get a code to reset the iCloud account that way.

Either that or going through Apple may be your best bet since the pics are likely backed up to his Apple’s iCloud. Apple gives everyone free 5GB so surely there’s something there even if he didn’t pay for it or it lapsed after his passing.

I got this idea from the San Bernardino shooters years ago. Apple refused to help the FBI hack into the phone but said they would help if the FBI let the phone back up to iCloud at night like this because it’d be on their servers and technically theirs to comply with.

So it seems this might be some type of legitimate way of getting stuff out of an iPhone like this by Apple’s own admission. I just checked and Apple does have an article on this exact situation and what they can and cannot do https://support.apple.com/en-us/102431

My condolences to you and your family. Good luck getting those pictures.

There’s a decent chance that the iPhone syncs to iCloud each night. It’s a feature Apple kind of snuck onto people and most people don’t change. Photos are one of those things that gets backed up during this time.

Thing is, you need to get it connected to WiFi that it has connected to before and just leave it on the charger, probably best to do this over 48 hours and then try getting in. The backups usually happen at night time.

If you know the WiFi where he lived but can’t access it, you could trick the iPhone into thinking it’s the same WiFi by creating that same WiFi signal name and password and the iPhone will connect to that new hotspot you create with the same instructions. If it’s valuable enough to you, you could buy a router and set it up on yours at home with that information or go cheap and set it up on your phone’s hotspot. If you don’t know that one, any other WiFi network it once connected to should do. It just only works over WiFi at night.

Once that happens, you can try resetting his password on iCloud.com and see if that lets you in. Or see if Apple can help you getting into the iCloud account with his death certificate. I’m not sure on that last part, might need to check into it before asking just to make sure they don’t lock you out of it or something.

You may not even have to do the WiFi trick, it might already have backed up everything already and you can try getting into this iCloud account now and see if the pictures are there. They’re accessible over any web browser on any operating system.

Lmao pay Google for a problem they created. Get fucked sucker

It’s not an easy thing to do. Torrents of copyrighted stuff are illegal yet we still have sites galore for them.

VPN companies will move operations to specific locations and countries that accept them and many countries will happily take them in. The only sure fire way to deal with it then will be to block those countries which won’t happen either.

At one time, we were promised that having cameras in our faces wherever we go would make things safer. “This invasion of your privacy will make you safer.”

That’s clearly not been enough to completely stop this so now we need to take it one step further and use lasers.

That will be the end all, be all to put a stop to this.

But if and when it isn’t, it’ll just lead to the next victim feeling we didn’t go far enough.

Next is going to be requiring every citizen have a drone fly behind them and follow them wherever they go and they pay for this invasion of their privacy. The laser thing just wasn’t cutting it. Someone got assaulted and the people who were supposed to help her didn’t show up. But now having drones follow you and monitor your every movement is going to stop it once and for all. Of course it won’t follow you into your bathroom because that would be taking it too far…

…until someone gets assaulted in a bathroom, then we’ll move to now violating your privacy there as well and that will be the end to all of these evil people being evil, once and for all. We promise. That’ll be the last time we violate your privacy and the evil people will stop being evil for sure 👍

Great….something other countries are now going to follow suit with. For “public safety” and “protecting the children”, of course.

I don’t think he has an account there either. He needs help doing anything on his phone.

I’m sure that’s part of it, the bot just pulling from some of those sites and summarizing it in the results. Though I’ve never seen one that includes political party. That part threw me off.

I remember Facebook can determine your political affiliation, but my relative has never had a Facebook account.

I ran into something like this the other day. I know one of my relatives’ birthday is in February but didn’t know which day and he won’t tell me because he doesn’t want me to send him a card (even though he always sends us cards on special days).

I googled his first and last name, the state he’s from, and “birthday”. The first “result” was one of those AI generated results that gave me his first and last name plus middle initial, the city and state he lives in, and even what political party he is affiliated with, plus his birthday. I was just hoping to get a quick link to a White Pages site to figure out which one was his and then get his birthday, but this fucking thing doxed the hell out of him without me even asking.

He has no social media and spends his time just watching YouTube as his only form of web browsing. How they have all this information on him is beyond me or why they’d allow their bot to dox people so easily like this.

From what I’ve read, it’s the companies/people behind the OS, not the end user. But I said “people” because my concern isn’t for the Microsoft’s and Apples but the guy who makes my favorite Linux distro or me compiling my own without this nonsense.

It also makes me wonder what happens if I do things to circumvent this like using a VPN to trick a site into thinking I’m not in California so I can specifically get an ISO that doesn’t include this.

I fully understand that and it doesn’t make me feel any better about this.

It’s still a violation of privacy at its core and serves no purpose except continuing a dangerous slope of getting people adjusted to this overreach and leading to worse laws.

At best, it’s government overreach greed to extort money from people for not properly following yet another arbitrary law.

I realize this is “old” since this news comes from October 2025, but I am just learning about this after reading about the Colorado bill. I thought I was lucky to be in California…fuck me.

Unless I’m not aware of anything deeper, Apple makes all their privacy settings available under the Settings app > Privacy & Security. There are a lot of menus to go through in here, but for max privacy, you’ll want to disable nearly everything available in here ranging from location services to apps getting access to the local network and other apps as well as access to hardware.

macOS is similar to Windows in that a lot of apps will request permission on first launch or when you do something specific in them that will trigger a permission change and you’ll enter your password/TouchID/Apple Watch to confirm you want to grant access or not. But you can proactively block access here and also supposedly block Apple from some of these as well.

Beyond that will likely be up to you as to what you want in terms of privacy. Some people may go as far as airgapping it from the internet while others are okay with an app or two having access to the local network.