And this illustrates my problem with Franken and all the far left -- government agencies are trampling over Americans' privacy, and his issue is whether a private company is taking sufficient safeguards to avoid making it easier for the government to trample that privacy.<p>As opposed to, you know, getting government to stop abusing its power.<p>Half of his questions are "what's Apple's legal interpretation of our abusive laws?" It doesn't really matter what Apple's interpretation is. What matters is the secret court's secret decisions about what those laws mean. It's good that Franken voted against renewing the Patriot act, but he should be sending this letter to his colleagues that voted for it, not Apple.
It's not like a scanner that's taking a picture of a finger and storing the image on a chip. From what I can tell, the biometric markers of individual fingerprints are used as a hash to generate a strong password -- much stronger than a user generated password. The fact is, the standard 4 digit pins that most users use are not very secure. (From what I can recall of a recent security seminar I attended.)<p>Given the privacy concerns that have been news lately, it's understandable that this would raise some eyebrows, but when combined with something like the iCloud keychain for generating strong online passwords, this could actually be a great benefit to individual privacy.
Looks like the anti-spying-stories brigade is out in full force today flagging this and the two stories about GCHQ hacking the Belgian telecom companies
I still don't understand all this uproar over fingerprinting.<p>Fingerprints are <i>obviously</i> incredibly insecure. They're <i>obviously</i> identifiable. How is this news?<p>Fingerprint readers on phones are like locks on doors -- they deter casual people, but are totally worthless against anyone determined. But still pretty useful for their convenience in most situations.<p>Fingerprint readers on phones are for preventing your mother or your girlfriend or your son or your coworker from getting into your phone. And nothing more. It does zilch against police/government/espionage/etc. But it was never supposed to, any more than your front lock is supposed to keep a SWAT team out.
It should be worth noting, taking someone's fingerprint and duplicating it is surprisingly easy. In fact, a duplicate print has been used to open door locks and even computer locks as the Mythbusters have shown :<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Hji3kp_i9k" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Hji3kp_i9k</a>
The answer to this problem is to create a technology which allows for easy replication of fingerprints once you have a digital copy. Once that technology exists it will completely remove the use and value of fingerprints since the existence of a finger print won't prove anything.<p>3D printers could provide that system as long as they are precise enough to print fingerprints at scale.