Aussies stunned by little-known iPhone rule hitting users 04:55

Now on Drive... Good old Charlie Brown. ..for the Harvey Norman clearance ends Sunday. Don't miss unbeatable deals on laptops and mobiles, TVs, furniture, Aussie-made bedding and more. Harvey Norman clearance ends Sunday. Did you know that Apple has a policy that doesn't allow you to access locked devices without erasing everything on it? Well, so for grieving family members, for instance...

can be devastating because it can mean they can't get access to photos or other important memories after their loved ones pass away. But there's a way around it. It's called legacy content.

A contact, legacy contact. To talk more about this, Charlie Brown, the host of 2GB's Life and Technology, joins me. G'day, Charlie. Hey, Clinton. How are you, mate? I'm good, mate. I've actually thought about this in the past because I've had friends of mine who've passed away at a young age, I'm sure like many of our listeners, and they still have profiles, for instance, on Facebook, which I find a little bit spooky sometimes. But it's actually dawned on me what happens to their phone and all the content on their phone.

Yeah, this idea of passing on your digital assets once you're no longer walking the earth is one that sort of started coming about maybe five to ten years ago. As you described, people's social media accounts, for example, lingered on and were still there even though the person had sadly left us. Yeah.

Apple has their system, and it's a pretty good system. Basically, you nominate while you're the account holder. You nominate somebody, and it could be anybody. They don't have to have an iPhone or they don't have to have an Apple ID even. You nominate them, and they are given a unique access key, if you like, or a unique code. And should you pass, they...

Then they basically front to Apple with a death certificate and that unique code within three years of you passing. And they then are given access privileges to your data as the legacy contact. Now, if you don't do this, and there's plenty of examples around on the internet where people have run into this barrier, right?

You can't get access to the person's data unless you've actually got access to the device and the pin code on the device itself. I've actually had listeners come to me and say, well, can you help me with various brands, not just Apple, but Samsung, Google, that kind of thing, and they're all just as strict.

And the reason for that strictness is because at the end of the day, your data is yours. You are the owner of it. And just because you've passed on, I guess these companies believe that it's not up to them to pass that information on. It's up to you as the owner of it to put in place the process to have it handed on once you go. I guess this is a very basic way of doing it, Charlie, but I've...

put together a document with all my passwords, and it has my Apple codes there as well, and the code to open up my phone, I put that together in a document. It's in a top drawer. So I told the wife, that's what to look at. And I'm glad you've thought about it, Clinton, because most people don't. My father-in-law passed away two years ago, and it was never even thought about in my family that he was the one that controlled all of his family's digital access.

access points and when he passed they let his mobile phone number lapse because we didn't need a mobile phone anymore then all of a sudden when my mother-in-law was trying to get things done digitally she ran up against the barrier that his phone number was the two-factor authentication point for all his accounts now because of my job I was able to go to Optus we could retrieve the number because nobody else

had actually gone and taken that number since it had been released, so to speak. And we were able to get it back. And I obviously put in place a process to ensure that we don't lose that number again. But it shows you that one chink in the chain, and not only are you dealing with the loss of a loved one, Clinton, you're dealing with a lot

of challenges around how to progress from there and move on and live your life, so to speak, in a number of different ways. Almost out of time. Charlie, what's coming up on the show tomorrow?

A brand new Aussie tech startup is coming to talk to us about a new desktop monitor with touchscreen innovation that's actually doing pretty well here in Australia. We'll talk to them. Plus, new AI PCs. We'll talk to the tech company that makes all that tech possible tomorrow on the program. That Apple program, Legacy Contact, is a really good idea. Thank you, Charlie. We'll catch you tomorrow. Thanks, Clint. See you, mate. You can hear Charlie on Life and Technology tomorrow morning from 8 o'clock right here on 2GB.