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Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

You realize you can still use your pin to open it it right?

And you can disable the biometrics with a simple key combination.

And when the police sieze your phone and use your face to unlock it before you can disable it? Ever wonder why apple allows for five tries with the fingerprint reader? They can guess whether you are right handed. After that there are only five digits to test.

As for if injured: go with something like a pin or pattern that doesn't require any paticular body part. My fingurprints never scan properly after swimming or rock climbing.

Apple added an Emergency mode in iOS 11 that’s accessible by clicking the sleep/wake button five times. It also disables Touch ID/Face ID and requires the passcode after that. So if you think your phone will be seized, it’s a pretty quick way to disable everything but the passcode.

https://www.macrumors.com/2017/08/17/ios-11-emergency-sos-di...

> So if you think your phone will be seized, it’s a pretty quick way to disable everything but the passcode.

Good luck if the cops assault you from behind or early in the morning...

By that logic they can also just assult you while the phone is unlocked... which is probably many more times than early in morning.

I've just tried this on my iPhone 7 for the first time (iOS 11.1) and it takes way more than 5 clicks to activate.

iPhone 6s with iOS 11.1 took exactly 5 clicks to bring up the emergency screen and disabled TouchID.

Don't do this on your iPhone X... I just did this to test if it disabled Face ID, and it beeped really loudly with an emergency alert blip. It startled me and my dogs; I dropped it on my lap, and almost didn't get to cancel the 911 call before the 3 second timer went off.

Not 100% accurate - if you disable the "Auto Call" function, you don't have the alarm or timer. [1]

Turn off Auto Call

When Auto Call is on and you try to make an emergency call, your iPhone begins a countdown and sounds an alert. After the countdown ends, your iPhone automatically calls emergency services.

Here's how to change the setting:

Open the Settings app on your iPhone.

Tap Emergency SOS, then turn Auto Call on or off.

If you turn off this setting, you can still use the Emergency SOS slider to make a call.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208076

On iPhone X I believe you can just "squeeze" the phone by pressing buttons on both sides to activate this.

I'm not sure that "I should lock my iPhone biometrics" is going to be the first thing on anybody's mind when they're getting arrested.

And when the police sieze your phone and use your face to unlock it before you can disable it?

If you think that members of law enforcement aren't going to use "rubber hose decryption" if they really want access to your phone, you trust them a lot more than I do.

>go with something like a pin or pattern

The pin is required to enable biometrics, it’s not one or the other.

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