Apple Talks About Touch ID Privacy Concerns

The iPhone 5S was released with a long rumored feature – the fingerprint sensor. The fingerprint scanning system is called Touch ID and while many people were excited when Apple announced the Touch ID feature, they were also thinking about the potential security issues that such a system might give birth to. Apple decided to clarify some things about Touch ID, in order to calm people’s fears.

An Apple spokesperson said the high end successor to the iPhone 5 will not store images of a user’s fingerprint; this statement comes to clarify an early impression that the Cupertino based company may have left. Dan Riccio (Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering) said this in a promotional video for the newly unveiled iPhone 5S: “The sensor uses advanced capacitive touch to take, in essence, a high-resolution image of your fingerprint“; he then explained that the data captured by the sensor is then analyzed and then “all fingerprint information is encrypted, and stored inside the secure enclave” on the smartphone’s powerful A7 System on Chip. Apple felt that the promotional video left things unclear and decided to shed some light on the subject, as only ‘data’ is stored, not the actual image of the user’s fingerprint.

Storing just the data (the digital signature of the user’s fingerprint) as opposed to an accurate recreation of the fingerprint is of course less bad in the context of privacy concerns. However, in the event someone gets access to your iPhone 5S without you knowing, they will surely gain access to a lot of sensible data; not to mention that the fingerprint identification could probably also be hacked in a number of ways. There is some good news though – if you are one of the people that are going to be using the Touch ID system, it seems that Apple decided that the iPhone 5S will need a passcode in order to unlock it after a reboot or if it wasn’t unlocked at all in the last two days.