IPhone 5S: How safe is your fingerprint with Touch ID?
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There; I've said more of substance than the author said in his whole article.
A lot of the paranoia on Reddit and even HN seems misplaced to me. Federal and state governments already have large fingerprint databases. Most of you probably don't even remember when the police visited your grade school and taught the class about finger printing. Guess that they were collecting. So it's possible but unlikely that the federal government will collect your fingerprint data. However, we KNOW that the federal government is widely collecting communication metadata. This information is a much greater threat to freedom than your fingerprint. Both datasets are identifying, but one reveals a lot of additional information - about your lifestyle, habits, politics, speech, ideas, etc. The fingerprint conveys none of these.
The government has lots of ways to identify you if they want to. Most of these methods of identification are MUCH easier to implement than fingerprints (communication metadata and patterns, face recognition, license plate tracking, etc.). In the end, making a cell phone call is more convenient but less secure than other types of communication, but we accept this trade-off. The trade-off for using a fingerprint to facilitate dozens of daily interactions with your phone seems possibly more favorable in terms of privacy.
I'm not saying there's no threat to privacy here just that there are a lot of reasons other than the NSA and PRISM that make data privacy important and that we should be focused on the larger issues.
But are you aware that US Government already collects and stores very many fingerprints?
Here's a 2008 Reuters article: (http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/03/25/us-security-finger...)
> The U.S. government has been collecting digital fingerprints and photographs of nearly all non-citizens aged 14 and up entering the country since 2004, officials said, in a Homeland Security program called US-VISIT, at a cost of $1.7 billion.
> [...] On an average day, almost 14,400 international visitors undergo the fingerprinting process at Kennedy, officials said.
> More than 2,000 criminal and visa fraud cases have been detected by the screening process, introduced in response to security concerns following the attacks of September 11, 2001, U.S. officials said.
They fingerprint vast numbers of people, and use "detection of criminals" as a reason, but don't seem to catch that many people.
See also DNA gathering - the UK has a huge horrible DNA database. It's easy to get on that database (be arrested) and hard to get taken off that database.
I wouldn't be surprised if fingerprints were being stored by some government agency somewhere. Not sure that'd be NSA, because there's not much they can do with it.
Don't get me wrong, I think fingerprint scanners are probably broken until proven otherwise, but this article does nothing to enlighten anyone...