[flyosity]

I remember when two of my friends got Android phones that were face unlockable. First thing we did was hold up an iPhone with a picture of their face to it and it worked to unlock the phone! We tried this a bunch of times and it worked every time. I don't know if the technology still sucks like it did about a year ago but I have a feeling that Touch ID will not be foiled as easily.

[coldtea]

Face unlock is a gimmicky BS feature. It used to be fooled even by an image, and it can fail easily in low light or such.

But the most important thing is that it's a BS procedure, to have to look into the camera and get it to capture your face. Not the natural way to hold the phone when casually unlocking it (I, for example, as lots of people, do it casually at an angle to my face).

Putting your finger on the home button, on the other hand, is something you have to do anyway to open it, and you can even do it while the phone's getting out of your pocket.

Don't Android manufactures/users defending this see these OBVIOUS flaws?

[ZeroGravitas]

They updated it to check for a blink, but even the android phones that had a fingerprint scanner a few years ago, and made by the same company Apple later bought, isn't getting any respect so clearly any non-Apple approved security engineering decisions are declasse.

[Bud]

More trolling from you, just like elsewhere in this thread. As you are no doubt well-aware, Apple's fingerprint scanner is not at all the same technology as the Android phones of the last few years, which all, without exception, use the type of sensor you must swipe your finger across. These are less reliable, less fast in recognition, and less secure.

[Someone]

Not necessarily. Technology can go from 'gimmick' to 'wow' in a few years. For example, faster CPUs or improved software may have decreased both the false positive and true negative probabilities.

I don't know whether that applies here, though. I have no experience with either the 'old' and the 'current' technology, and this review does not give much info, either.

[coldtea]

Or, you know, the Android guys put it out early, when it wasn't early, usable, or fast enough yet, just to seem "innovative", and Apple put it when it's confident that it (as much as possible) "it just works".

You know, there were lots of mp3 players before the iPod too. If you wanted a bulky, crappily assembled gadget with a frustrating UI (and FM radio!).

[gcr]

Check out this video of a biometrics professor fooling high-end fingerprint scanners with a gelatin finger printed from a digital image of a fingerprint: http://youtu.be/K1Sx_BmfZ8I

Now consider that an attacker with physical access to your phone can either lift your fingerprint from the screen (you have been touching the screen, haven't you?), or can retrieve the software image of your fingerprint by plugging your iphone into their computer.

[flyosity]

After reading about how Touch ID actually works, and how it reads the characteristics of the electrical field created between the sensor and the valleys of your finger's living skin tissue, I think it will take something more sophisticated than this professor's gelatin mold. Also, there is no software image of your fingerprint stored on the iPhone, it's a hashed signature of various data points from the electrical field, not a 2D or 3D representation of your fingerprint. Of course I'm not a biometric security expert, just someone who's been reading about Touch ID, so maybe I'm wrong.

[megablast]

To be fair, the technology doesn't have to be completely safe, it just has to be good enough. It probably is good enough, for those who don't even use a code.