But, and here is the important part, those 'leaked fingerprints' in the wild are not digitally preserved. It would actually take some effort to preserve on a scene. The comparison is not apt.
The point is that reader has those preserved and stored somewhere, while fingerprints that a person just leaves about by going about their day are not. Just the fact that they are stored is an issue. Note, this is a response to the original question of 'pfft, a person leaves fingerprints all the time anyway'.
> A fingerprint on the other hand cannot be observed.
This is not correct [1].
It won't be that long before someone gets around to training some sort of ML system to scour photographs to extract fingerprints and start building a database of everyone's fingerprints. These databases will only expand in coverage/accuracy and the quantity leaked will only increase. Fingerprints for authentication will not survive the next decade.
> They said it was all ok because that the actual fingerprints aren't stored on the system, only information derived from the fingerprints
I hate this blatantly flawed reasoning. The data collection is the problem, and it doesn't matter if you store pictures of fingers/faces/irises/ids or just their post-process signatures, it's still data collection.
I don't think fingerprints are the same at all. While still having privacy implications, fingerprints to match against broadcast content aren't uploading your family photo or caps from your home movie if that's what you're showing on screen.
The fingers are out of focus. No amount of image resolution will correct for out of focus optics at the time the photo was taken. The fingerprints are nowhere to be found in this picture. So clearly something is bogus about the claims in the article.
Exactly, the fingerprints aren't material evidence in this case, but communicative testimony that could lead them to unspecified future material evidence on their phone. It's not the same thing at all.
Except that the photo they've shown is clearly way too low quality to get fingerprints. Presumably they actually used his palm (the article sort of mentions it), and they have a really small pool of people that they suspected so they could just manually compare his palm with known palm prints.
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