Today Apple unveiled it's new premium iPhone 5S and with it, it's new fingerprint sensor technology, Touch ID. Users will be able to use their fingerprints to unlock their phones and authorize music & application purchases, which is admittedly very cool.
Some of us here at OnSIP can't wait to get our hands on it, but others have their reservations about the long-term implications of using and potentially exposing our unique biometric data in our daily lives.
Here is a quick list of pros and cons we thought up of. We'll start with the pros:
- Instant, easy access to phone
- Instant authorization
- It's fingerprint recognition technology—that's cool
And some cons:
- Your fingerprint can never be changed, and it's a good security practice to change passwords
- Going off the above, if someone steals your fingerprints, isn't that pretty much permanent identity theft?
- Privacy policy concerns (Note that Apple states that fingerprint data is saved deep in the chipset and not stored in the cloud anywhere )
We want to know what you think.