This is the best summary I could come up with:
Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California released a ruling that concluded state highway police were acting lawfully when they forcibly unlocked a suspect’s phone using their fingerprint.
The case didn’t get a lot of coverage, especially because the courts weren’t giving a blanket green light for every cop to shove your thumb to your screen during an arrest.
The ruling was also complicated by the fact that Payne was on parole at the time, back in 2021, when he was stopped by California Highway Patrol where he allegedly had a stash of narcotics including fentanyl, fluoro-fentanyl, and cocaine.
However, the panel said the evidence from his phone was lawfully acquired “because it required no cognitive exertion, placing it in the same category as a blood draw or a fingerprint taken at booking, and merely provided [police] with access to a source of potential information.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, has offered guides for best practices when attending protests, and one of those is to turn off your thumbprint or face unlock before you hit the street.
“The general consensus has been that there is more Fifth Amendment protection for passwords than there is for biometrics,” Andrew Crocker, the Surveillance Litigation Director at the EFF, told Gizmodo in a phone interview.
The original article contains 988 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Thank you.
I’ve avoided willingly using biometrics so far. Though I’m sure our faces, gaits, body shapes, etc, are all stored somewhere, willingly or not.
Say no to biometrics. It’s like having a password you can never change.
Password you can never change
Not with that attitude! You can absolutely change your face. its rather inadvisable
it’s not a password; it’s closer to a username.
but realistically it’s not in my personal threat model to be ready to get tied down and forced to unlock my phone. everyone with windows on their house should know that security is mostly about how far an adversary is willing to go to try to steal from you.
personally, i like the natural daylight, and i’m not paranoid enough to brick up my windows just because it’s a potential ingress.
It’s not a great analogy. Your house and its windows are exposed to your neighborhood/community. Your internet device is adjacent to every hacker on the web.
it’s an analogy that applies to me. tldr worrying about having my identity stolen via physical access to my phone isn’t part of my threat model. i live in a safe city, and i don’t have anything the police could find to incriminate me. everyone is going to have a different threat model. some people need to brick up their windows
So, it really depends on your personal threat model.
For background: the biometric data doesn’t leave the device, it uses an on-device recognition system to either unlock the device, or to gain access to a hardware security module that uses very strong cryptography for authentication.
Most people aren’t defending against an attacker who has access to them and their device at the same time, they’re defending against someone who has either the device or neither.
The hardware security module effectively eliminates the remote attacker when used with either biometric or PIN.
For the stolen or lost phone attack, biometric is slightly more secure, but it’s moot because of the pin existing for fallback.
The biggest security advantage the biometrics have to offer is that they’re very hard to forget, and very easy to use.
Ease of use means more people are likely to adopt the security features using that hardware security module provides, and that’s what’s really dialing up the security.
Passwords are most people’s biggest vulnerability.
I’ve read all this before. If you believe the people who designed and implemented the device and its myriad layers of firmware and software were 1. All acting in good faith and 2. Knew WTF they were doing… then: yes, sure.
Unfortunately that’s way too many strangers for me. Hundreds of people design and code these things. Meanwhile, every week there’s a clever new breach somewhere.
While I do respect that viewpoint, there’s a lot more independent scrutiny of the hardware modules than there are around the parts that would handle any other authentication mechanism you might use.
Pixel phone example iPhone example
Just because something isn’t perfect doesn’t mean we should keep using the less good thing that it replaces.
Use the PIN if that’s more your cup of tea, just so long as you move away from passwords, since it’s the HSM that’s the protection, not the biometrics. Those are just to make it easier than passwords.
If you’re that afraid if the people who build phones, why are you ok with using any device that can access the internet?
Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California released a ruling that concluded state highway police were acting lawfully when they forcibly unlocked a suspect’s phone using their fingerprint.
You can turn that and Face ID off on iOS by mashing the power button 5 times- it locks everything down.
On Graphene/Calyx you can auto-restart the phone after a given time period if it hasn’t been interacted with. Recommend turning this on for all users.
Android has a similar feature. It’s called “Lockdown mode” on the shutdown menu. Locks the phone and turns off any biometric unlocks.
Except it doesn’t activate by mashing the power button 5 times. On my Pixel 8, that activates the emergency dialer that will automatically call 911 if you don’t cancel the prompt in 5 seconds. I did not know that before. Probably a better use for that feature. It also points out the different ideologies of Apple vs Android.
My wife’s pixel 3(?) with a flaky power button had us wake up to cops knocking on the door because of that feature.
On my Pixel 7 Pro, I press the power and volume up buttons simultaneously, then I can click Lockdown. Now my passcode is required to unlock the phone.
That’s terrifying. So once we have tech to forcibly see inside the brain, that will be legal too?
Probably. Wouldn’t it be good to have the truth during investigations?
However I think that we really need refine when warrantless searches can occur. Right now many searches seem to be done with very little evidence to justify them. I think this protection should apply to your mind and phone just like it applies to your house. This probably also needs to be considered at border crossings. Right now they have basically unlimited rights for searching what you have on you with little to no evidence.
We should probably also rethink about how the information is shared when there is a warrant. Right now during a trial a huge amount of personal information can be made available. Maybe if it was easier to get precise information less would be needed.
Wouldn’t it be good to have the truth during investigations?
Well, yeah, but the mind is fallible. That’s why eye witness testimony usually only gets a case so far, people tend to forget specifics and fill in the gaps without realizing they did.
However I think that we really need refine when warrantless searches can occur. Right now many searches seem to be done with very little evidence to justify them. I think this protection should apply to your mind and phone just like it applies to your house. This probably also needs to be considered at border crossings. Right now they have basically unlimited rights for searching what you have on you with little to no evidence.
to be fair to the current justice system, a lot of times you can just hit the courts with “excuse me sir, this was unwarranted” and assuming it was actually unwarranted, they should overthrow it immediately.
Not if it comes with a level of invasiveness that is unforgivable it wouldn’t be.
Forcibly invading someone’s mind after they were convicted beyond reasonable doubt would make you a monster.
I’ve always wanted a setting to create a lockdown key and an unlock key. So something like middle-finger to unlock but index-finger to force it into PIN/password only mode. So you can have some convenience of a quick unlock but if an authority figure asks or forces you to unlock it you can one-tap lock it down.
In GrapheneOS, a single wrong fingerprint disables fingerprint unlock until the password is entered.
In a getting pulled over situation, this works. But do it before you go protest anything. Or better yet, leave your phone at home. You don’t want to be reaching for something while a cop is pointing a gun at you and saying “Hands up!”
Not to mention it’s pretty regular to track who is participating by checking the towers in the zone all the people are participating.
⚠️ WARNING: On android, mashing the power button 5 times calls emergency services…
Not on my Pixel 6. 🤷♂️ It just does what I told it to do, namely to open the camera.
Edit: these are some Reddit down votes. I just didn’t know I had this feature, and I apparently have disabled it, but I don’t remember doing so. Oh well.
Cool, you disabled the gesture. Clearly the default SO setting doesn’t apply to you…
Have to tried? On my Samsung pressing twice does the camera (as I’ve set it to) but doing 5 times tries to call emergency services.
There are two ways you can do this on Android currently, but they’re not as quick. You can try to unlock with the wrong finger 5 times and it will stop allowing fingerprint unlocks. Or, you can hold down the power button for 10 seconds and the phone will reboot and also disable fingerprint unlocking.
## How to disable Face ID through the Power Off screen
- Hold down both the Side Button and either Volume Button at the same time for three seconds.
- The Power Off slider should appear. Tap Cancel.
You actually don’t need to hit cancel, you can just hit lock, so you can do this whole thing with your phone in your pocket.
https://appleinsider.com/inside/iphone/tips/how-to-quickly-disable-face-id
This is easier and less intrusive than the lock-button-5-times method because it doesn’t start making a phone call that you have to quickly cancel.
This is the advice people (with iOS) should follow, not disabling biometrics altogether. Using FaceID or TouchID prevents shoulder surfing to find out what the password to your phone is. When local passwords have so much control over a device, using biometrics to prevent anyone from seeing what your passcode is is very useful.
