The Health application from iPhone, which can record a variety of information regarding our health, was used to solve a crime committed in Germany last year. A 19-year-old girl was raped and killed by a man in Germany, her body being thrown in a street, and the killer was caught by the authorities, and he was sent to court in September.
The young woman's phone, an iPhone 6S, was recovered by the police and it seems that they also managed to break her access code to obtain data from the Health application, which contributed to locating the victim when the crime took place. The application registered an activity similar to that of climbing stairs, and the investigators correlated this activity with the moment when the victim was thrown to the edge of a river by the killer.
"The app recorded a portion of his activity as "climbing stairs," which authorities were able to correlate with the time he would have dragged his victim down the river embankment, and then climbed back up. Freiburg police sent an investigator to the scene to replicate his movements, and sure enough, his Health app activity correlated with what was recorded on the defendant's phone."
Despite the connections made by the police using the data taken from the Health application, it is interesting how they accessed the information from the phone by removing its access code. It seems that the police hired a company from Munich to break the iPhone, its name not being disclosed to the press, but it is clear that the police in Germany cannot unlock iPhones, just as the police in the USA cannot.
"He refused to give authorities the passcode to his iPhone, but investigators hired a Munich company (which one is not publicly known) to gain access to his device."
Apart from the fact that the information from the Health application was used to try to prove a crime, it seems that this would be the first case in which the access code of an iPhone 6S was cracked for a criminal investigation. The police, of course, refuse to provide too many details regarding how they obtained access to the data from that iPhone 6S, so we will never know for sure what happened to it.
