An iPhone 6, thought to belong to a Florida teenager lost at sea in 2015, has been recovered from the vessel the youth and his companion were in when they disappeared. Both Austin Stephanos and Perry Cohen were just 14 when they embarked on a small fishing trip off the coast of Jupiter, Florida. Mystery surrounds what happened to the pair, after a large-scale air and sea search failed to find the teenagers, but did locate their empty 19-foot boat some two days after they were reported missing on July 24, 2015.
Although the empty vessel was marked for recovery with a data buoy, it malfunctioned, and the vessel was once again lost. It was only on March 18 this year that their single-engine craft was rediscovered by the Norwegian supply vessel Edda Fjord, with Austin Stephanos's iPhone found on board. Stephanos's father has been in touch with Apple about the iPhone, reports CNN, and is hopeful that the iPhone might yield some clues as to what happened.
"[Apple] seems willing to help us try to get the phone operational again. That would be the first order of business, since Austin's phone has been submerged in salt water for over eight months," said Blu Stephanos. The family had tried, unsuccessfully, to access their son Austin's iCloud backup, but apparently he hadn't activated the function. "Every IT professional that I've contacted warned me that there is a very, very slim chance that anything can be recovered from this phone ... but I'm not giving up hope," Stephanos said.
Although the mainstream media have tried to conflate this case with Apple's fight over data encryption with the FBI, the data request is from a family grieving for the loss of a son, with hope that there might be a final farewell message on the iPhone in question. Apple has refused a similar request from a family in Italy with a functional iPhone. Further, it is not clear what level of passcode protection Stephanos had enabled on the iPhone, or if there was an iCloud login passcode that Apple would potentially be able to recover.