“Apple Inc.’s use of fingerprint scanning in its new iPhone models could lead more device makers to adopt the authentication method as a successor to passwords – – and that’s fine with privacy advocates,” Todd Shields and Allan Holmes report for Bloomberg. “The introduction coincides with the rise of cybercrime and revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency has intercepted Internet communications and cracked encryption codes on devices including the iPhone.”
“Apple said that on the new iPhone, information about the fingerprint is stored on the device and not uploaded to company networks — meaning it wouldn’t be in data batches that may be sent to or collected by U.S. intelligence agencies under court orders,” Shields and Holmes report. “‘They’re not building some vast biometric database with your identity associated with your fingerprint that the NSA could then get access to,’ Joseph Lorenzo Hall, senior technologist with the Washington-based Center for Democracy & Technology, said in an interview. ‘That’s a good thing.'”
Shields and Holmes report, “Apple’s use gives the technology an endorsement that will probably lead other mobile phone makers such as Samsung Electronics Co. and HTC Corp. to include biometrics in their products, said Avivah Litan, a technology analyst at Gartner Inc., the Stamford, Connecticut-based research company.”
MacDailyNews Take: Yeah, except Apple owns AuthenTec now and the technology may require a powerhouse 64-bit processor like Apple’s new A7. Good luck moving Google’s fragmandroid to 64-bit, perpetual Apple followers… no, actually, make that “bad luck.”
Shields and Holmes report, “‘This is an inflection point because companies are looking for better ways to authenticate users,’ Litan said in an interview. ‘This is an important milestone.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Here’s hoping that Apple’s revolutionary iPhone 5s forces the slavish copiers of the world to rush out poorly-working fingerprint recognition.
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