Ruling: Thumbprint scan is like a "blood draw or fingerprint taken at booking."

The legal situation is more complex and nuanced than the headline implies, so the article is worth reading. This adds another ruling to the confusing case history regarding forced biometric unlocking.

    • treadful@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      I just wish you could setup logic for this. Pulling out your phone to hold the power button for 3 seconds and then tapping the lockdown button is slow, very obvious, and likely to be prevented by an attacker.

      Would be great if I could set it up to lockdown on a specific finger, or a specific number of presses on an analog button. Or even like if I leave a WiFi network or some other arbitrary condition.

      • ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        8 months ago

        This article and similar threads keeps popping up in my feed, so I’m going to keep spreading this tip around. (I’m using Android.)

        I use tasker to automatically lockdown my phone based on accelerometer and Bluetooth. A sharp tap to my phone or being disconnected from Bluetooth is enough to lockdown my phone and disable all biometric access. I dialed in the sensitivity so that it doesn’t take much, just a tap on my pocket, being set down a little too aggressively, pulled from my car and thrown to the ground is all it takes. I set it to notify me with a quick vibrate when it does this for a little added confidence that it is behaving as expected.

        For a little added effort I can have tasker snap a photo that gets backed up to the cloud any time there is a failed unlock attempt, just be prepared for some unflattering photos of yourself looking like an aging male boomer posting selfies to the facebook.

          • ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works
            0·
            8 months ago

            I encourage you to figure it out yourself because it’s not that difficult to figure out how to implement and I’m lazy. I’ll give you one more hint though. Because these tasks interact with the system at a deeper level, you may need an app like “Secure Settings” to make this work. Tasker used to be able to do a lot of stuff like this on its own, but with every release of Android it seems like Google cuts off access to another one of Taster’s features.