The new Iphone 5s which unlocks using your fingerprint has some people worry about loosing their finger on thefts of phones, BUTT we had come to find out that the system apple uses actually needs a really live finger in order for it to work.
I am grateful to Fast Company’s CoLabs for attempting to soothe furrowed brows and tightly clenched fists
It explains that Apple’s scanner doesn’t work by optics. Rather, Apple’s new system probes beneath the layer of you skin to see the real live action beneath.
So the sensor is looking for something that has slightly more alive characteristics than, you know, a severed finger.
However, because those with devious minds tend to have a lot of time on their fingers to be devious, there might be all sorts of ruses that will arise in order to break into a fingerprint-locked iPhone 5S.
Fast Company posits the idea of whether one might try and imprint a fingerprint on a piece of red meat, or perhaps molding a fingerprint in ballistic gel.
But iPhone thieves generally work on the principle of fast and furious. Will they really bother with vast technological setups in order to make a few hundred dollars?
Will they really try and recreate the live prints of severed fingers? The whole thing sounds like an especially gruesome movie starring John Malkovich.
It is, indeed, possible that Apple’s fingerprint scanner is a genuine upgrade in phone security.
There’s still, though, something slightly uncomfortable about one’s fingerprint being recorded in yet another database somewhere.
One great problem, as exemplified by German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble a few years ago, is that once your fingerprint has been copied, you can’t get new ones.
If there’s one thing that society has learned over the last few years, it’s that the more you put yourself out there, the more your information can be used to ends that you might never have imagined.
