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Feds Can't Force You To Unlock Your iPhone With Finger Or Face, Judge Rules (forbes.com)
A California judge has ruled that American cops can't force people to unlock a mobile phone with their face or finger. The ruling goes further to protect people's private lives from government searches than any before and is being hailed as a potentially landmark decision. From a report: Previously, U.S. judges had ruled that police were allowed to force unlock devices like Apple's iPhone with biometrics, such as fingerprints, faces or irises. That was despite the fact feds weren't permitted to force a suspect to divulge a passcode. But according to a ruling uncovered by Forbes, all logins are equal. The order came from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in the denial of a search warrant for an unspecified property in Oakland. The warrant was filed as part of an investigation into a Facebook extortion crime, in which a victim was asked to pay up or have an "embarassing" video of them publicly released. The cops had some suspects in mind and wanted to raid their property. In doing so, the feds also wanted to open up any phone on the premises via facial recognition, a fingerprint or an iris.
If I'm not misunderstanding, the police can still search the phone, if they can find a way in. This seems to say they can't force you to put your finger on your phone, but it doesn't sound like they can't try to figure out the code on phones they are able to bring into evidence. Unless I'm mistaken, that still seems like they can take your phone, run your prints... and I'm sure in a few years they could easily have a device to quickly 3d print the fingerprints onto some form of glove or something.
Now let's find a sane judge who will stand with the constitution and declare Civil Asset Forfeiture to be unconstitutional as it most certainly is.
Because I don't want to type in a password every time I look at my phone. I don't keep anything in the general storage that I don't want someone else to see.
If you don't care about the data behind the biometric lock, and the data you do care about is behind a different lock, why use biometrics at all? I am seriously asking here and genuinely am curious why.