What does that even mean? You wear gloves in public all the time? You wipe down everything you touch?

Which makes me wonder, aren't one's finger prints all over your iPhone exterior anyway. If someone steals one's phone wouldn't it be easier to dust it for prints than crack the security on the digital copy?

Ding ding ding! We have a winner.

Almost as silly as not using a biometric logic because "what if they use a backdoor to get a photo of my face?"

I think there is too much of an emphasis on using uniqueness for security. The idea is that if "It could only be you!" you are secure.

The sci-fi vision is a world where a fingerprint or retina scan is taken and that's it. There's no username needed, just the fingerprint itself is enough to confirm your identity. In reality, the idea of uniqueness for security actually would create security problems, because it removes the other factors involves, and biometric codes like fingerprint cannot be changed as needed (technically a fingerprint can be changed 9 times. A voice on the other hand cannot.)

An NFC tag/card/ring, seems much better to me, since these can be changed as needed and would be more difficult to hack than taking a fingerprint off the phone.

An armed thief could steal your ring or fob along with the phone, but they could also make you use your finger to unlock your phone for them. So I don't think that's really any added protection in that situation.

The thief that just grabs your phone off the counter or out of your pocket will have a much tougher time with the NFC tag than with the fingerprint.

That said, I can see how this could potentially dramatically increase the availability of public fingerprints if it were hacked. More importantly the fact you can't reset your fingerprint is something I overlooked. I do think that in general though anyone building a system that relies exclusively on a fingerprint as a highly hack-resistent security measure is foolhardy regardless of how prevalent fingerprint data is. In other words, your iPhone passcode isn't protecting your data anymore than your fingerprint if someone gets their hands on your phone, so I don't really see how this point is material to if it's a good idea to use fingerprints to unlock phones.

It's not quite the same with private keys because you can always generate some new keys and publicly revoke your key if it could have been compromised. Since you cannot regenerate your fingerprints and could have already lost them, simply revoke them up front.

Edit: expanded on this in my blog: http://blog.oleganza.com/post/60865284958/key-revocation-and...

My passport also is one of the last ones you could get without it containing any biometric data.

As such, I'm reasonably sure that no third-party ever had access to my fingerprint. And I'd love for it to stay like this (see my parent comment for the reasons why)

And to someone who may ask me "why would you want the freedom to do something bad?" I'll answer that three of the biggest monotheistic religions are based on a guy a girl who were allowed to do bad things (Adam and Eve). I'm agnostic myself but I find it pretty self-explanatory nevertheless , you just can't impose the lack of free-will on people.

Is it just me, or is HN getting really frikkin' paranoid?

to someone who may ask me "why would you want the freedom to do something bad?"

I think you're over-reaching.

But pragmatically, the more data they have, the more likely you are to show up as a false positive. Worst case; you handle something in a hardware store and it's later made into a bomb by a third party. You're going to need a solid alibi for that one.

Or you get placed at the scene of a protest even though you weren't present for it. Now you're on the terrorist list.

Additionally they can catch you more easily for victimless crimes, like if your fingerprints are on a bong they collect. I figure it's easy enough for them to stick you with a felony even without actively helping them get more data. So I'm trying to minimize the felonies I can be stuck with.

Fingerprints are a horrible biometric.

They might be a bad biometric but it's not because they aren't universally available to everyone.