Comment by daughart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by daughart | Hacker News Reader

It seems like Apple has been clear about the security of your fingerprint on your iPhone. Could the NSA be hacking your phone and retrieving this information? Nothing is impossible, but probably not if Apple has done what they describe.

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 feel like the mention of the NSA and PRISM in this article is so tangential to the issue as to be misplaced. Why mention the NSA here when there's no evidence or reason to suppose that they'd want to mass-collect our fingerprint data specifically? I mean, I suppose anything that is sent over the internet might be intercepted and stored/analyzed by the government but it's getting to the point where NSA and PRISM are just popular buzz words adopted by anyone and everyone trying to make a name for themselves in the tech community ("check out my app that pokes fun at the NSA and PRISM issue", "5 reasons I will be protecting my data from NSA/PRISM").

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.

I agree that the shoe-horning of NSA / GCHQ into every possible thread is tiresome.

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.

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