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Modern fingerprint reader systems don’t capture and store an entire fingerprint. They use algorithms that extract a number of features from the print. You can’t

Modern fingerprint reader systems don’t capture and store an entire fingerprint. They use algorithms that extract a number of features from the print. You can’t extract someone’s fingerprint from a gym’s fingerprint scanning system and run it through a background check database, for example. If you’re concerned about giving up identifiable data points, the photo on your gym membership account is more likely to be usable in other search contexts than the application-specific reduced fingerprint data stored in their scanner.

nullc 5y ago
> You can’t extract someone’s fingerprint from a gym’s fingerprint scanning system and run it through a background check database, for example. Until they swap out the reader at the door for one that also saves fingerprint images (if the one there doesn't support that already!).
Blikkentrekker 5y ago
Or one's simple legal name and billing address. I'm honestly a fair bit more concern about that dealing in legal names and addresses is still so common than I am about tracking cookies, but, as usual, people are more afraid of new things than of old, even if the old be more dangerous.
dane-pgp 5y ago
> You can’t extract someone’s fingerprint from a gym’s fingerprint scanning system and run it through a background check database, for example. Reversing the algorithm in order to generate a plausible fingerprint from the features stored by the scanner seems much simpler than cracking a secure hash function, since the scanner algorithm has to deal with imprecise inputs. Whether the generated fingerprint would match the relevant record in the background check database depends on whether the features extracted by the scanner are sufficiently different from those used by the background check system, and I suspect that companies just reuse the same algorithms for both.

nullc 5y ago

> You can’t extract someone’s fingerprint from a gym’s fingerprint scanning system and run it through a background check database, for example. Until they swap out the reader at the door for one that also saves fingerprint images (if the one there doesn't support that already!).

Blikkentrekker 5y ago

Or one's simple legal name and billing address. I'm honestly a fair bit more concern about that dealing in legal names and addresses is still so common than I am about tracking cookies, but, as usual, people are more afraid of new things than of old, even if the old be more dangerous.

dane-pgp 5y ago

> You can’t extract someone’s fingerprint from a gym’s fingerprint scanning system and run it through a background check database, for example. Reversing the algorithm in order to generate a plausible fingerprint from the features stored by the scanner seems much simpler than cracking a secure hash function, since the scanner algorithm has to deal with imprecise inputs. Whether the generated fingerprint would match the relevant record in the background check database depends on whether the features extracted by the scanner are sufficiently different from those used by the background check system, and I suspect that companies just reuse the same algorithms for both.