The new Touch ID fingerprint sensor within the iPhone 5S handset has come under fire from a prominent U.S. politician, who has expressed concern the data could be used to 'impersonate a person for life.'
Senator Al Franken, a former comedian who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, wants assurances from Apple regarding how the prints will be safeguarded.
In an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, the representative for Minnesota pointed out that passwords can be changed infinitely, but once thieves get hold of our prints, it's the end of the road.
He wrote: "Passwords are secret and dynamic; fingerprints are public and permanent. If you don't tell anyone your password, no one will know what it is. If someone hacks your password, you can change it -- as many times as you want. You can't change your fingerprints. You have only ten of them. And you leave them on everything you touch; they are definitely not a secret. What's more, a password doesn't uniquely identify its owner -- a fingerprint does. Let me put it this way: if hackers get a hold of your thumbprint, they could use it to identify and impersonate you for the rest of your life."
Can it be extracted?
Apple has assured that the fingerprint data will never leave the iPhone 5S and will never be stored on the company's servers or uploaded to iCloud.
Third party developers have also been shut-out from using the tech at this stage.
However, despite conceding that Apple has probably implemented this tech responsibly, Franken wants to know whether its possible to extract the fingerprint data from the device itself.
In one of a number of questions within the letter he asked: "Is it possible to extract and obtain fingerprint data from an iPhone? If so, can this be done remotely, or with physical access to the device?"
Source : techradar[dot]com
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