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Re:Samsung: Anyone's thumbprint can unlock Galaxy S10 phone by tialaramex on Thursday October 17, 2019 @07:23AM (#21280859)
Note that this is _much_ less useful than it appears for the same reason as misleading stats often offered to courts when evidence partially links a suspect to a crime.

The problem is that it says random people, but people aren't random. We don't periodically just stir all the people in the entire world and redistribute them across the globe.

In courts you'd get a situation where a jury is told there's only 1-in-10-million chance this evidence would match a random person. Only a few hundred people in the whole world could have been the one, and yet this suspect matches. And what they may not get told unless a defence lawyer brings it up is oh, by the way, six of those few hundred people were in the place where it happened and four more lived in the same street as the suspect.

Bob's Face ID may only match 1 in a million people. But if one of those "1 in a million" people is Bob's twin brother Dave who is always pranking him, and another is Bob's cousin Barry who doesn't look that similar to a person, but mathematically it turns out Bob and Barry's faces look identical to a computer vision system due to their bone structure, then Bob won't find "Face ID" much use.

Re:Samsung: Anyone's thumbprint can unlock Galaxy S10 phone by throwaway744678 on Thursday October 17, 2019 @07:55AM (#21281049)
Your argument is correct for FaceID, but it does not transfer to TouchID. The fingerprints of twins are not more similar to one another than that of two random people.
Re:Samsung: Anyone's thumbprint can unlock Galaxy S10 phone by cantrevealname on Thursday October 17, 2019 @08:31AM (#21281293)
> The fingerprints of twins are not more similar to one another than that of two random people.

That’s not accurate. Family members have more similarity in their prints than among random people, twins even more similarity, and identical yet more.

I can’t immediately find authoritative references for family and fraternal twins, but here’s a reference for identical twins:

“Identical twins have the same chromosomes and similar physical characteristics and, therefore, they have a high class/type similarity in their fingerprints.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3338710/

Re:Samsung: Anyone's thumbprint can unlock Galaxy S10 phone by seandougall on Thursday October 17, 2019 @01:08PM (#21284113)
"Class/type similarity" means that twins are likely to, say, both have whorls on their right index fingers, but doesn't mean they'll have the same pattern of ridges. So for the sake of biometrics, that doesn't make them more similar than two random people.
Re:Samsung: Anyone's thumbprint can unlock Galaxy S10 phone by throwaway744678 on Thursday October 17, 2019 @09:01AM (#21281531)
I stand corrected!

Time to switch to a good old PIN if you have an (evil) twin, then!