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by devmunchies 1156 days ago
This is why passcodes are better than biometric auth. It’s easy for an officer to hold the phone up to your face.
3 comments

No. Stop. You are giving a false sense of security, as it seems to me like you're applying US laws to the UK, which is wrong.

In the US, you're correct that giving up a password is something understood to be protected under the 5th Amendment, whereas being forced to unlock by face or fingerprint is not[0].

In the UK, this is not the same. See point 59 of [1]:

> The power to search anything which the person has with them includes the power to search electronic devices, such as mobile phones. The person must provide access to any electronic device to allow for a search to be undertaken, including where access to a device requires the person to unlock a device through application of their thumb or finger, or any other form of access control (e.g. voice or face recognition).

[0] https://www.concordlawschool.edu/blog/constitutional-law/fif...

[1] https://www.counterterrorism.police.uk/wp-content/uploads/20...

Unless the parent edited, I don't believe they claimed it wasn't illegal. I mean we're here because the title of the article says as much. But you can pass any law you want, and it'll still be very easy to press a person's finger to a button against their will
It’s super easy to disable biometric auth immediately, either explicitly all through repeatedly failing the biometric auth by moving and keeping your eyes shut.
Not a foolproof method I would trust if I had something to hide from the police.
not sure how much face recognition was disabled by this but I rolled my eyes all the way up and it did not unlock, kind of strained my eyeballs though.
yes the rolling eyes method is the way to avoid it if you get into that situaiton.
They'll just wait until you can't hold your eyes up anymore.
it will try like 3 times before requiring a passcode
Unless they use the Ludovico technique
Don't tell the cops I hate showtunes
Exactly. You can't force a 34 character password out of a human brain if they have the will to refuse. All other means of storing and presenting cryptographic tokens are vulnerable.