I made it clear that I was referring to original post alluding that the technology is able to scan your fingers... not physically accessing and fingerprinting the device.
Did you actually read my posts? I made that abundantly clear.
No ***** that if you touch your phone and they physically get hold of it that they can get your fingerprints. That is a completely different argument altogether. They can also get fingerprints from anything else I touch. Duh!
So, just to set the record straight here, Jordon Golson posted excerpts from Senator Al Franken's letter to Apple in which he posed a series of idiotic questions which clearly demonstrated his lack of grasp on the technology, inability to read or accept Apple's very clear statements regarding Touch ID, and basically amounted to nothing more than blatant media whoring. According to Golson, one of those questions was:
- If it's possible to extract and obtain fingerprint data from an iPhone 5s either remotely or with physical access to the device.
To which I commented:
I'm pretty sure that if you have physical access to a touchscreen device, there are ways to get the owner's fingerprint data—even if the device lacks a fingerprint scanner.
After several commenters over-thought that statement way too hard and replied that I was somehow wrong, I pointed out that:
My screen picks up fingerprints CONSTANTLY.
Dusting for fingerprints is a technique that has been around for some time now. We leave our fingerprint data on thousands of surfaces every day, many of which are publicly accessible. You probably leave a fair amount of other biological data in bodily secretions on everything you're in contact with, so it's not just fingerprint data you leave behind.
Both Apple and your mobile operator know your name, date of birth, address, email address, credit card number, likely current location, browsing history, musical preferences, who you communicate with and how, and your voice print, and they store this data on their servers with your blessing. They also store the hashes of your account passwords, and since most people aren't terribly creative, they probably have the hash to the password you use for every other account you've ever set up. Why in the heck would you care if they associated fingerprint data with your device (which they don't) anyway? If you're concerned, just don't turn on Touch ID (there is no requirement to do so). Although you'll probably continue to leave Photo Stream turned on so every selfie that might portray you in some immodest, compromising, or legally questionable circumstances is immediately pumped directly to Apple's cloud servers.
Asking questions like these about Touch ID is such classic misdirection. If you so much as leave the house these days it is likely that your image will be captured by hundreds of cameras. An image of your fingerprint is nothing special, it's just a close-up shot of one part of your body. The footage captured by the myriad cameras in our daily lives can tell anyone with access to it far more about you than what the folds in one tiny patch of your skin can.
So how long until we have capacitive touch gloves with randomly generated fingertip patterning so we can use Touch ID anonymously or in colder climates?
I've been watching him for years, he is just as corrupt and dishonest as the rest of the yahoo's up on Capitol Hill. (that goes for BOTH sides of the aisle).
