And now your fingerprint is your password

It's a god idea.  This is how the armies of the govt. will be able to tell the humans from the aliens when the invasion occurs.  Ask Tuwood.

I was a bit taken aback by the new finger print scanner as well. I always thought the government would love to have a database of every finger print, would make all those Law and Order episodes where there are no prints in the database so much easier to solve. 

For me, I am unfortunately already on record. I had to get finger printed for a professional license as well as for my CWP so they already have me in the system. I suppose the only way they could use it against me is they could without doubt verify my location every time I unlocked the phone. 

But LB can already verify my location, what I had for lunch and when my most recent bowel movement was with just a few key strokes so I guess I am not really getting anything over on the man anyway.

Yeah, they say it is only stored on the phone and just a digital signature is uploaded for purchasing stuff off the appstore.

But they also said they weren't tracking the old phone's movements and that didn't turn out to be so true.

The government has had mine since I was 18... so I don't care.

Well... and a couple times since... but we won't go into that.

just put tinfoil on your finger, it works.    Oh yeah, and.... (drumroll)   "If you're not doing anything wrong then who cares"

My understanding with the iphone fingerprint scanner is that it's using the capacitive touch signature of your finger.  So it's basically grabbing an electronic signature of the "peaks and valleys" of your finger and then comparing it to the stored signature to unlock your phone.  I don't even think it would be possible to generate a fingerprint image from the signature, but I could be wrong.

There are optical fingerprint scanners which take a true picture of your finger and compare the picture to a stored picture.  Those would be your more traditional scanners but they're not on the iphone.

Now from the privacy standpoint I would be curious to their policy for using the data and sharing the data.  If there's a buck to be made there's a pretty good chance the data will be shared though.  lol

It is getting into uncharted legal waters though.  If the NSA were to match up somebodies fingerprint from their phone to a crime 20 years ago I'm not sure how the courts would treat that.
So, if you killed somebody 20 years ago I'd probably just buy a droid to be safe.  ;-)

Hmmmmm....I don't know.  We do digital fingerprints now.....there is no ink.  So.....can the "peaks and valleys" you speak of be tracked through your phone?  I say yeah......but I don't know the mechanism for it. 

I know this...whatever we give up of ourselves eventually is used to identify us....so I have to fall on the side of yes, your fingerprint can be pulled from your phone, or whatever device, and be used to identify you....at least some day.

It's futile.....the more advanced technology gets the more it is used against us.....that's a given.  How do you get away from that?

Yes but it is just a post card in the mail that you send back, no fingerprints.

I managed to stay out of "the system" until I was 25 and got a professional license with the state that required my prints. No more murder for hire for me.

Give it a year or two and keep an eye on the Black Hat and Defcon hacker conferences.  You can bet they'll be all over this now that it can be used for app-store purchases.  If they still can't find a flaw in the software, then I'll feel better about it.

I don't see a problem using it for phone unlocking, but for purchases I'd recommend using 2-factor authentication if possible.

Side note: funny / sad how you can get more reliable security info from anonymous sources these days when the big companies are being silenced by the NSA.

Apple says it won't work with an image, only a real human being -- see the comment above about capacitance.

Whether that is true or not remains to be seen.

lol, I was going to post that as well.

Also, I'm changing my response on the fingerprint scan portion itself.  One of my engineers bought one and he showed me how it registers his finger.  He rolls his finger around on the spot as it paints a perfect image of his fingerprint.  If any areas aren't perfect it has you press that area of your finger again to get it perfect.

So, I'm pretty sure they have a perfect image of your finger print.  Probably clearer than any image you've previously had scanned. 

Well duh, but it's only stored on the phone.

Geez, loosen the tin hat already. Apple says nothing ca go wrong, so it's fine!