Apple’s long-espoused principles, specifically an individual’s right to privacy. Steve Jobs had valued consumer privacy, but his successor, Tim Cook, was a fanatic. He believed Apple’s users should have complete control of their private digital lives. And if an Apple customer decided to wipe their iPhone clean of data, no one else—individuals, family members, companies, law enforcement—should be able to find a trace of that data on the device afterwards. Wiping an iPhone was final; the data was gone.
