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Comment by brian-armstrong | Hacker News Reader

I'm fairly shocked to find that a community of seemingly technically competent people would forfeit their 4th amendment rights in order to save a few seconds keying in a passcode. This small detail feels like a microcosm of tech in general currently :/

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You might unlock your phone 10,000 or 100,000 times over its lifetime. It is just a hugely convenient thing to have that work as quickly as possible, without needing to enter a passcode every time. How likely is it that you will experience an unexpected breach of your 4th amendment rights where you don't have time to disable biometric access to your phone in advance, especially as the iPhone has a 'panic button' specifically to do this quickly. Face ID requires you to look at the phone anyway so in theory it's simple to avoid giving access to a cop.

Who’s forfeiting anything? If you don’t want to unlock your device for law enforcement, just use the sleep/lock button to make your phone require the passcode (which the police can’t legally compel you to give, I believe). It takes several seconds to key in a reasonably secure passcode, and it ceases to be secure if you type it in view of any security cameras. Also, if you open your phone 50 times per day, it’s way more than just a few seconds.

You're counting on your ability to (and memory to carry out) access and disable your phone after encountering law enforcement?

The fourth amendment covers search and seizure by the government, not the willful disclosure of information to a company by a user.

But I get what you mean. Even without getting into my inherent distrust of facial recognition systems and the security/privacy implications of creating the infrastructure for it to work reliably, biometrics are usernames. They shouldn't be used as passwords.

I wasn't clear with what I meant, sorry. I was referring to how face unlock can be compelled but passwords cannot, though I realize now this is actually 5th amendment.

Any time I'm about to go through security, I long-press the volume and side buttons which immmediately activates the requirement for passcode to unlock.

It's a quick and easy shortcut to enable the passcode requirement.

Thank you. Reading the comments on HN always leaves me wondering if I'm the only one that doesn't have any interest in any kind of biometric unlock feature.

The kind of person who thinks this way used to be quite prevalent on HN but they've slowly disappeared. Unclear if they've simply aged out if reading HN and younger folks don't understand this mentality or if somehow HN is not preferring this mindset in general now. It's definitely missed though.

Fingerprint reader is convenient, but were I to travel a lot, I'd disable it.

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