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Comment by visural | Hacker News Reader

Why would you want your phone to be the key to your most secure data?

Also from what I've seen in the past most finger print scanning and cheap, "organic" identity verification tech is not reliable and easily circumvented.

Despite not being perfect, basic password authenication (or even better- pass-phrase) is a security mechanism that's easily understood, easy to implement and can be pretty secure.

(Although still possible to do badly/incorrectly as we keep seeing).

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This isn't about what "you" want.

It is about what large companies want.

And the gov't. They'd like to more easily gain access to everything you subscribe to.

I want a widely adopted standard for 2 factor authentication. You are not sending your fingerprint to companies, you are sending a key generated by your hardware from your fingerprint.

Not just that, but in lesser-developed countries biometric identification can be dangerous. If you get mugged for your ATM card, you can tell them your PIN and they'll let you go, free to repeatedly use your card until you freeze it. But if you need a fingerprint to authenticate, they're going to let you go too, and maybe with one less finger.

Not really a concern in America, but in other places like Mexico, Latin America, India, Asia...

> Not really a concern in America, but in other places like Mexico, Latin America, India, Asia...

Well it would be if biometrics became widespread.

India's uID project has the biometrics and identity information of over 327 million civilians. This means they've reached about a third of their goal of creating a nation-wide identity and biometrics database.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_Identification_Authorit...

You are forgetting that it only works for your finger sensor. 2FA: your specific finger sensor's token + some key your sensor generates from your fingerprint

> maybe with one less finger.

Modern fingerprint readers check for temperature and pulse[1]. That doesn't undo the actions of a determined, but ignorant, criminal that saw such a gruesome technique to bypass readers in a movie.

[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2013/02/22/fingerprint...

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