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Here's the sequence of events:

1. You're walking, with your phone in your pocket.

2. Suddenly, a cop accosts you. You don't have time to react.

3. They detain and restrain you (with handcuffs or otherwise)

4. They pat you down and find your phone

5. They hold up your phone to your face to unlock it

I know that people who've never been detained or interacted much with cops think that this is a completely unlikely situation, or easily avoidable, but I promise you it is not.

TouchID isn't great from a law enforcement perspective, but it's light years ahead of FaceID.




As someone who has been stopped/questioned/detained before domestically and internationally (as well as at border checkpoints) as well as mugged, I can assure you that touch vs look is pretty much the same (definitively not light years in difference). The solution is to be proactive. If you are going to walk down the street in an at risk area, you hit the power button five times. If you are about to go through a CBP checkpoint, then do the same. When you go to sleep, do the same (admittedly TouchID is more susceptible here than FaceID).

FaceID / TouchID are a "convenience" to be used when you are comfortable with your surroundings. Can you be caught off guard even when you are paranoid? Of course, nothing is ever guaranteed in life, except death and taxes as the saying goes!


> The solution is to be proactive. If you are going to walk down the street in an at risk area, you hit the power button five times. If you are about to go through a CBP checkpoint, then do the same.

You and I have incredibly different experiences of policing and detention if, for you, "be proactive when you're at-risk" is appreciably different from saying "don't use FaceID ever".


Or I guess our detection of risk differs. I have never been detained when I didn't have a "hair on my neck raise" with enough time to disable my phone.

If you are in such high risk situations continuously that "be proactive when you're at-risk" is appreciably the same as "don't use FaceID ever", then I say you are doing something very wrong and not just incidentally being stopped for a suspicion of possibly doing something wrong.

Either way, your experience is definitely not in the 99.9999% of the population which FaceID would be sufficiently safe if it proves to be as secure as Apple implies. For you, let's hope you aren't using a numeric pin code either!


Even for long alphanumeric passcodes, a pipe wrench has a 99.99% effectiveness in passcode discovery, given sufficiently bad actors. https://xkcd.com/538/


However, if police are willing and legally able to do that, then I think basically all phone security goes out the window anyway.

The biometric attacks being discussed here are ones that could quite plausibly be used against you in many/most districts in the US, and be totally legal for the police to use.


Please don’t link to XKCD, especially when it’s been already done multiple times in this thread. It is pretty much the lowest effort comment you can make besides maybe “+1”.


Here's the sequence of events:

1. You're walking, with your phone in your pocket.

2. Suddenly, a cop accosts you. You don't have time to react.

3. They detain and restrain you (with handcuffs or otherwise)

4. They pat you down and find your phone

5. They take your hand and place it on the fingerprint sensor.

Ignoring #2 (and the terrible language you used), I don't see how my scenario is significantly more or less likely than yours.




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