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Comment by aw3c2 | Hacker News Reader

The NSA's gonna love the fingerprint collection from Apple.

Except they specifically said the fingerprint is never sent across the Internet, but is instead stored locally on the A7 chip.

Ah, the NSA doesn't need the internet for these things. They will have a custom backdoor that slurps up the fingerprint as soon as you plug in your phone to sync.

Until their team of analysts finds a way in... or secret court orders it.

> Except they specifically said the fingerprint is never sent across the Internet

And no one has ever found exploits in mobile devices that allow data that is supposed to be locally stored to be remotely accessed.

I shall use my middle finger then.

epic.

i didn't consider it before.. but that is so true and scary at the same time.

Why? What are they going to do with your fingerprint?

fingerprints are a means of identifying you. I don't know about the laws where you are but in my country the police and state do not have fingerprints of every citizen, just the ones with criminal records. In case of a crime the police matches prints in the scene with the ones in the db of usual suspects plus the people who have a motive for the particular case. If they had a database of everyone's fingerprints I can't imagine how many times innocents would be wrongfully incriminated.. and you know with USA security agencies who can make foreigners disappear and end up on Guantanamo bay.. this is scary.

Sorry, it's not scary, and mentioning Guantanamo Bay is extremely paranoid and way out of line. If they're really out to get you they don't need your fingerprint.

Apparently, the fingerprint data is stored directly on the A7 and is not accessible to non-OS software; also, not backed up to iCloud.

It will be interesting to see just how secure that data is.

Presumably it's just a bog-standard TPM (the only non-standard part being that it's part of a SoC.)

Supposedly the data is encrypted, stored in the A7, and never leaves the phone.

They're not uploaded from the phone (in theory at least).

are you sure that this is in the world where Showden exists?

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