When Apple announced that the iPhone 5S would be getting a fingerprint sensor under its home button, there were some who were excited about the innovation, and at the same time there were those who were worried that this basically gave hackers more information about you, and with reports that the NSA can easily hack into our phones, this is just more data that iPhone users could be unwittingly handing over. Well the good news is that if you were a little worried about that, Apple has since released a statement to the Wall Street Journal where they clarify that only the data of the user’s fingerprint is stored on the phone, as opposed to an actual fingerprint image itself.
This probably stemmed from a YouTube video released yesterday where Touch ID was detailed and in a statement made in the video, “The sensor uses advanced capacitive touch to take, in essence, a high-resolution image of your fingerprint.” This seemed to give iPhone users the idea that an actual image of the fingerprint was stored on the phone. Like we said, Apple has since clarified that this is not the case, but rather the digital signature rather than the entire print will be kept in the phone, which hopefully will be able to assuage the fears of those worried about their privacy.
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