Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., expressed concern about...
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., expressed concern about the privacy protections for Samsung’s fingerprint scanner on its new Galaxy S5 smartphone, in a Tuesday letter to Samsung executives (http://1.usa.gov/1v2ekrc). “Passwords are secret and dynamic, while fingerprints are public and permanent,” Franken…
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said. “Fingerprints are the opposite of secret.” Humans leave fingerprints everywhere, he said. “If hackers get hold of a digital copy of your fingerprint, they could use it to impersonate you for the rest of your life.” Franken said the Galaxy S5’s fingerprint scanner had been hacked, days after its release. The same thing happened to Apple’s Touch ID, which it rolled out on the iPhone last year, Franken said. He asked for more information about how Samsung’s technology generates fingerprints, what security measures it has, how it interacts with third-party apps and whether Samsung believes users have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” for the fingerprint data provided. Samsung did not comment. Franken’s staff has been a consistent presence at the NTIA-backed facial recognition code-of-conduct multistakeholder meetings, which have touched on similar biometric issues.