Meh, convenience matters. The alternative to me using a fingerprint reader oh my phone isn't me typing 16char alphanumeric password every time I pull my phone out, it's to not use a password at all.

Most people don't have attackers going after them who are harvesting fingerprints to get into their devices.

A mugger can get into your device - less relevant now given that wallets are where the value is 99% of the time but given pay with phone options growing in popularity that might be a matter of concern eventually.

A guy with a gun in my face can have my PIN. I’ll also happily provide my fingerprint or look at my phone to unlock it.

This idea that digital security is going to solve for physical violence is absurd unless you’re willing to die to protect your digital assets.

> unless you’re willing to die

I feel like that's getting the threat model wrong. The mugger wants to spend as little time with you as possible. If a fingerprint is needed to make purchases, then it can actually be significantly better than a PIN, and even a PIN is a lot better than nothing because they have to memorize it.

Sure. Have a fingerprint or PIN or whatever. Totally reasonable. Mugger takes your phone in a rush, can’t unlock it later, sells it for $10 to someone who’ll gut it for the pieces. Sucks, but not as bad as the mugger also emptying your bank account.

But my response is to the belief that a security factor that cannot be directly taken by force is somehow more secure. If you’re guarding The Football, sure. You might actually be willing to die for that. If you’re willing to die rather than reveal your PIN to a mugger, though, your advice is not applicable to the vast majority of the population who value their lives more than their bank accounts.

The way around that complicates things - validation of circumstances and parties outside the sphere of power can avoid it. Anyone trying to force a withdrawal from someone's account at gunpoint at a bank itself would just be robbing the bank itself. Which being federally insured means robbing the federal government by force of arms. Which draws a heavy response from any sort of government.

I have noted that spiteful to lethal anti coercion measures seem surprisingly rare given the premium paid for security and even when a lesser value to human life is assigned. They would use ink bombs for robbers and not time delayed or remote triggered fragmentation bombs with the loot. I assume relative rarity and baseline risks (even military bases in hostile regions tend to restrict arms to the armory except for MPs, on duty soldiers, and maybe personal side arms for ranking officers who keep it holstered most of the time as opposed to readied) and margins are why even in places where security is tenuous enough that foreign businesses travel arrangements include at least one mercenary with an AK47 or its descendant as a guide, driver and bodyguard due to their guest being a relative king's ransom.

Theoretically ATMs could be fortress panopticons watched 24-7 and with a SWAT team readied to deal with compelled withdrawals but that just plain wouldn't be a sensible use of resources - cameras, willingness to write off or insure losses and policing makes far more sense.

I don’t see how any of this is relevant to the topic of muggers.

obligatory https://xkcd.com/538/

edit: - sorry if it's annoying but for me it was a very graphical way to always remember this issue.

Not annoying, just Hacker News. Funny/cute/meme/etc typically gets downvoted, even if it’s directly relevant, because of the strong fear of turning into the circle jerk of endless shitty joke threads like Reddit.

Am I wrong that an (inevitable) biometric data breach would mean this can be done on the cheap (if you were unlucky enough to have given your data to a third party)?

Yes, at least for finger prints. Getting the print is easy, especially with glass back phones, it's making a good enough fake that's non-trivial.

Do gummy bears not work anymore?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/05/16/gummi_bears_defeat_...

Well out of convenience you kind of have to. But if you really wanted to you can just disable it at ports of entry.

Which is easy enough to do on iOS: Hit the sleep/wake button 5 times quickly.

Careful - after iOS 12 that defaults to calling 911 for you (while also locking your device). You can change that in the settings though.

Correct, I just did this yesterday while idly fidgeting around with my phone. Fortunately I cancelled it in time to avoid creating a false alarm. Glad to hear it can be turned off, doing that now. WTF were they thinking, making it so easy to trigger by accident?

(Edit: OK, I'm confused. There doesn't seem to be an option to disable the emergency trigger entirely, but there's an "Auto Call" slider whose relationship to the feature is unclear. This slider is turned off, yet the phone still went into emergency mode when I clicked the button a few times. What a half-assed feature, sadly typical of Apple's work lately.)

They made it easy to trigger so that people can use it as a panic button. That was a customer request.

Apple gets a lot of customer requests, 99.9% of which they ignore, and 95% of which they should ignore. This was a funny one for them to select for implementation.

You don't have to. At least in Android it is fairly easy to disable the fingerprint reader and force a PIN to unlock.

> Well out of convenience you kind of have to.

What a sentence.

If it weren’t for convenience I’d lock myself in the house and never go out either. A dangerous world lies outside.

What about for devices that don't have usernames?

Still a bad idea as a password.

What about a second factor for TFA?

I have a simple test for if I should use biometrics for something:

Replace every instance of "New Biometric Tech" with "Social Security Number".

So it will become ubiquitous.