Firstly - the NSA has no need to be able to access the fingerprint. The fact that the fingerprint is your passcode barometrically ties you to the device, without a doubt, and makes the meta data all that much more accurate.
What we know is that the NSA has complete upstream dominance, direct and indirect access to company data and extremely powerful correlation tools.
With the features of the 5S' "always on motion sensors, tied to health apps - they basically can construct not only WHO, WHERE, HOW, WHEN, you do something, they'd be able to go as far to be able to develop a "health number" into that dossier.
The fact of the matter is that while the Apple product is a nice shiny thing - and sure - as a phone and a tech, I'd love to use it -- but the data it produces about its users is 100% transparent to the NSA, based on everything we have seen so far. And more egregious; the fact that the NSA unabashedly abuses this access and does construct elaborate pictures of your behaviour then SHARES this with other agencies.
The passcode and fingerprint only serve to prevent the data the NSA IS collecting from being wrongly attributed to another human body.
Do you believe disabling the reader in a software-setting is enough to be sure it's not working? I don't. With all these NSA concerns going about, having a hardware fingerprint-reader on your smartphone that you can't avoid touching is something to think about.
10,000 of those would keep the NSA quite busy.
(I guess you'd need a live terrorist's finger to replicate though. Those NSA types are pretty smart.)
Welcome to the Total Information Awareness world.
Even ignoring the specific issue of fingerprints, which I am not convinced is a major concern, the widespread use gives numerous other reasons for pause.
It's your hardware after all. If you're worried about it, take steps to protect yourself.
If I ever own one of these phones, I might have to make it a point in my muscle memory to use my knuckle to press the home button.
the same statement about "not providing direct access" will get them off easily like it already did for them and Google/FB/etc in case of the rest of personal information.
I'd say it would be negligent on the part of NSA to not use such a convenient source of fingerprints of "foreign" persons :)
>at least hope, that Apple has designed the hardware involved to be subpoena proof
why would a corporation intentionally do it? Conspiracy of obstruction of [future] justice comes to mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_%28crime%29
In criminal law, a conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime at some time in the future.
I would prefer the NSA not have my prints but virtually every other piece of data they collect is more likely to be used against me.
If you're talking about ISP monitoring, that's not specific to the iPhone, and not relevant to this discussion.
If iPhones phoned home information on stored on phones, I'd expect there to be a huge shitstorm and ample evidence of suspicious traffic. Do we have any evidence _at all_ that this has happened?
We know that the info can be sucked out of Apple (or Google, or Faceboob, etc) if the NSA wants to (for now).
So if they have your fingerprint data ... or even the ability to suck stuff off your phone ... then ... well qed
look obviously I'm in the minority, in caring about my biometrics being "built in" at such a "ground level" to a device that has so much connectivity to "the cloud" ... if you're not disturbed by this, then fine. I'm ok, you're ok. It is ok to hold different views.
For me, it's very relevant whether we have any evidence that the government is collecting data residing _on_ iPhones on any scale, or whether the iPhone has any such capabilities built in. As far as I know, this hasn't been reported.
I know that Apple technically can push out a software update that would enable data collection or even covert audio recording, but in the end I have to make a decision on the likeliness of this vs. the convenience of having a smartphone handy.
Regarding fingerprint data, the US already has that and will continue to do so for 50 years, due to the fact that I had to travel to the US for work related reasons. Not happy about that, but, well, that's life.
It may be optional, but that doesn't mean the device cannot acquire it without your knowledge. It is built into the home button after all.