Cupertino was clearly highly sensitive to any suggestions that users or critics might have had about the security of their fingerprint-based tech, and went to great lengths to ensure that consumers would feel as safe as possible when using the system. Samsung already announced a partnership with PayPal to allow fingerprints to enable payment verification for making purchases, and even that offers a fundamentally different philosophical take on how to use biometric information.Īpple allows purchases within its own iTunes stores to be authorized via fingerprint, but that’s only because it controls the entire transaction, and can guarantee the integrity of any transmission that goes on. It’s not yet clear exactly how Samsung stores and transmits its own fingerprint information to apps and services, but even opening up use of the scanner itself and fingerprint activity to third-party devs already marks a considerable departure from Apple’s approach. Fingerprint information collected by the iPhone 5s scanner hardware built into Apple’s home button is held on a ‘secure enclave’ within the A7 system-on-a-chip, and communicated to other services only as an encrypted alias that conveys no sensitive data. That move is in stark contrast to Apple’s strategy with its own fingerprint sensor tech, which is specifically off-limits to third-party devs.Īpple went to great lengths to emphasize just how segmented its fingerprint scanner was from the rest of the hardware, and how isolated (read: protected from hackers) the data that it gathered was. Samsung’s Galaxy S5 includes a fingerprint scanner embedded in the home button, and that hardware will be made available to third-party devs, the company announced today at a developer-focused event during MWC this year.
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