Given we're in a thread about biometrics being the opposite of privacy and security, it really does seem relevant to me that the threat model where they would be insufficient and the one where that would matter is basically empty.
If your thought process is "I need to protect this from the police and a determined or sophisticated criminal, but I can't be bothered to use anything more than my lock screen on my phone"... Well, you're already starting from a pretty bad place.
Yeah, and if you're being robbed they'll probably fuck you up pretty badly if you don't. While not mind readers, they don't have to be.
In most cases anyone who wants to beat your pin will just watch you unlock your phone. They don't need to see the exact numbers: you can pick most of it up just based on relative finger motion. Looking at screen smudges gives another set of hints that are pretty trivial to extract.
If your goal is to keep it from the police, your best bet is to use an entirely different system than rely on your phones lock screen.
I can't think of a scenario where I'm thinking both "biometrics are insufficient to safeguard this data" and "it's appropriate to keep this data on my telephone".
Sure, all that's true. But which of those criticisms doesn't also apply to a password or preshared key? Other than size of key-material, but it's a fast enough communication medium that any key less than a megabyte is effectively zero.
I probably don't need to point out how basically every communication on the Internet is based on public key crypto that we don't even think about, but I want to ask how you get your shared key to websites when you visit?
Do you use any tools like signal, telegram and so on?
My point isn't that public key systems are perfect, far from it. It's that it's wrong to say security and usability are contrary to one another.
People who think the public key solution is cumbersome are often comparing "no security" to "ideal security".
For public key to be secure from man in the middle you need a trusted out of band channel or attestation scheme.
For a symmetrical key system you need the same channel.
Without that channel public key has a message interaction where an attacker can swap in their key but is otherwise secure. The symmetric key system is entirely broken.
"Easy case" public key systems are usually a fair bit more secure than a similar level of effort in other schemes, and likewise a given level of security confidence is easier to get to with public key than a password.
Finally, and most importantly: your phone quite likely supports multiple levels of authentication.
You can get into my phone if you have my fingers. This let's you see my calendar, emails and (many) other things. It doesn't let you into all of my files, financial apps, or even device settings.
If I'm not alive I don't really care if they get the contents of my phone. My survivors can go through the same process I would for reversing a fraudulent transaction.
And you're picturing a criminal subduing me and then just crouching over my body and figuring out what financial apps I have and how to use them?
What's their game plan here? Most stolen phones are resold, not used to access their contents.
If you point a weapon at me in a way that would compel me to help you unlock my phone with fingerprint or face unlock, I promise you it would not be any harder for you to get me to unlock the device with the pin.
I'm on a relatively boring android phone and biometrics are only available in circumstances where it's already vaguely confident it's you.
Miss the fingerprint reader by too much? It's now a pin unlock. Haven't used pin recently enough? No biometrics.
It's pretty far from being replaced, considering I seem to need to use the pin on the lock screen several times a day at least.
Have you ever had your phone searched by the police or at the border? I haven't, but I have had someone try to unlock my phone before.
I'd contend most people have a threat model that puts opportunistic access by household members or someone watching them enter their passcode and then snatching the phone and running above border patrol search.
While you can't change your biometrics, walk me through why that matters. I'm not sharing my biometrics outside of the device, and you can't submit them remotely, so if you lift a print off of something it doesn't really get you much without also taking the phone. Once you're there, you're a bit beyond the typical phone thief in terms of threat.
The most common vulnerability is having an absurdly weak password, pin or unlock pattern. For those people biometrics is a vast improvement specifically because it's both secure against likely threats, and it's just as easy as hitting 5 four times in a row.
Every method has trade offs, and there's nothing to gain by pretending otherwise. Likewise, I don't think I would ever say "never use something", except for some contrived examples.
Totally true. That's not the common threat most people need to guard against however. Additionally, at least on Android, the device is relatively eager to force pin usage if the stars don't align for biometrics
Why do you think that? Public key authentication systems are invariably more secure, and a wide variety are also simpler for the end user to use.
It's a misconception that they are in opposition to each other. Why would they be? One's about knowing who's doing something and the other is about how much effort it takes to do it.
The disagreement about a comparison to Nazis isn't about what the Nazis did, or that doing what they did would justify comparison, it's that I fundamentally disagree that taking down an allegedly libelous document is the same as mass murder.
I'm familiar with the horrors of the Nazis, you don't need to rehash.
I'm not sure how a German court case about denying Nazi crimes has bearing on a theoretical UK court case about if an organization has a specific policy position.
You earlier mentioned that the case could be a PR and fundraising opportunity.
Have you considered if you would want them to fight it if they thought it would do the opposite? What if they just spent a bunch of money giving the assholes a platform to spew hate?
Oh, I didn't say it was acceptable or desirable. I guess that's why the downvotes.
I think that's what they're advertising, as opposed to the people who think it's a deep plot to hook kids or something.
The free shared group calendar that comes with my stuff is all I use for a similar setup. Only thing I wish it had was a better ability to notify me if someone else added an event, since I regularly have conversations with contractors or whatever where I say anytime should be fine, and then immediately have to backpedal when checking the calendar.
But for clarification, I don't want what I described and I don't think they can actually do most if any of what they imply with these backhanded advertisments.
I just think "manage the schedules of a busy family" is one of the most tried "wholesome" advertising gambits.
Retracting a report that they didn't think they could legally defend in court is a long way from justifying comparisons to Nazis.
Personally I would have rathered that they removed the report and released the information from the perspective of the US chapter with mildly revamped wording, but I get the course of action.
I'm not convinced it would be a pr coup or net financial win for them to publicly be unable to prove that "gender critical" organizations are defacto anti-rights in general, or that Rowling's sexual violence charity that was mentioned in specific was.
When the argument is that they over generalized and named organizations as guilty by association without justification, they wouldn't be arguing trans rights or equality but specific public policy stances.
Appearing to argue that a rape support center is in violation of human rights by catering to cis women isn't going to be the pr coup.
It doesn't matter that they're clearly anti trans and founded because the alternative didn't exclude trans women and had a trans director: amnesty would need to show they were an an anti rights organization.
I'm not saying that I like that they took down the report or apologized. Nor am I saying that any of the groups are accepting or good.
I'm just saying that Rowling and the stupid uk libel laws are better targets for ire.
Jk Rowling's? The UK government that places the burden of proof in libel cases on the defendent to prove that their statement is true in a court of law, while the plaintiff just has to show their reputation was damaged?
I'm not at all a fan of them removing the report, but it's not exactly a mystery who else you could blame for the situation.
The actual, boring answer is because family calendars can get complicated quickly and then ore people are involved and updating them the easier it is to miss something. So the use case of "will help you keep track of what the fuck is going on" is a legitimate advertising angle.
In an absurd sense, it's similar to the "oops, we forgot to put the safeties on and our super clever bot totally autonomously did something insanely sophisticated. Don't worry, we fixed it though". Anything sophisticated enough to stalk and harass a journalist is more than capable of planning a meeting.
Anything capable of putting together a podcast about everything going on is more than capable of actually sending you a reliable reminder for a doctor's appointment for your second kid that you weren't told about, or letting you know that you're not free Wednesday at 1 when talking with the repair person.
I'm not sure that's been extensively tested in courts. The document you referenced below appears to be as-yet not officially published, so I don't believe it actually qualifies as an official position yet, but the bigger issue is that it's untested in court.
This thread is a response to an AI court case where the ruling was that training on copy written works is fair use.
Alsup ruled in June that Anthropic made fair use of the authors' work to train Claude, but found that the company violated their rights by saving more than 7 million pirated books to a "central library" that would not necessarily be used for that purpose
Regardless, you do make good points and I think we agree that the end state is "they shouldn't be able to do that". I have concerns that using existing standards that take copying too literally results in some unintended ambiguity, and situations where AI training is incidentally blocked, but so is stuff like "opening a news article on a computer", which does the same things the copyright office report highlights as infringement.
I think we'd be in a much more agreeable place if we just legally state that a commercial AI tools training isn't fair use. That lets you have nuance like "search engine? It's a statistical model, but not generative: allowed. AI agent? Statistical model that's generating content as opposed to classification or ranking: not allowed".
It definitely does have the meaning of making an analog signal discrete, and DVDs are digital in that sense.
There's also the sense of serializing or enumerating something into a format more flexible or amenable to computer manipulation. More briefly: to put it on a computer.
For some things it's super obvious: a vinyl record has a groove you can see, and you digitize it by sampling the output of the wiggle: analog.
The contents of an SD card are invisible and the only way to observe them is via a computer, where they're already presented in a flexible format: not analog.
Then you have fuzzy things: a printed picture that was taken with a digital camera. Grab a magnifying glass and you can see that it's got blocks of quantized color, and isn't continuous. You digitize the photo by shining light on it and capturing the bounce.
Optical media is a disc with a groove in it that you read by shining a light on it to capture the bounce. Instead of a horizontal wiggle though it's pits creating an interference pattern with a laser.
It's digital because it's quantized information that it stores. It needs to be digitized to work with easily because the format is often read-only or write once. It's analog because the pits themselves are continuous and the system spends surprising amount of nuance correcting errors from things like fingerprints and dust.
Books are plainly analog, even though they're composed almost entirely of discrete, quantized units of structured information. Sometimes even with a lookup table and index for faster search!
Magnetic tape stores analog audio by varying the strength of a magnet with the audio signal. It stores digital information by only setting the magnet to specific strengths. Same for VHS or cable Internet.
To make a long ramble short: digitize also means to stick it on a computer, owing to efforts to digitize things often being focused on items that aren't continuous, like text.
Different senses of the word digital. The dvd is digital as in "made discrete and not analog".
I meant in the sense of "to move off of fixed use physical media and translate to a format more agnostic to storage medium or conducive to transfer and immediate processing".
More succinctly: to copy something to a storage medium that's harder to loose under the couch.
Given we're in a thread about biometrics being the opposite of privacy and security, it really does seem relevant to me that the threat model where they would be insufficient and the one where that would matter is basically empty.
If your thought process is "I need to protect this from the police and a determined or sophisticated criminal, but I can't be bothered to use anything more than my lock screen on my phone"... Well, you're already starting from a pretty bad place.
Yeah, and if you're being robbed they'll probably fuck you up pretty badly if you don't. While not mind readers, they don't have to be.
In most cases anyone who wants to beat your pin will just watch you unlock your phone. They don't need to see the exact numbers: you can pick most of it up just based on relative finger motion. Looking at screen smudges gives another set of hints that are pretty trivial to extract.
If your goal is to keep it from the police, your best bet is to use an entirely different system than rely on your phones lock screen.
I can't think of a scenario where I'm thinking both "biometrics are insufficient to safeguard this data" and "it's appropriate to keep this data on my telephone".
Sure, all that's true. But which of those criticisms doesn't also apply to a password or preshared key? Other than size of key-material, but it's a fast enough communication medium that any key less than a megabyte is effectively zero.
I probably don't need to point out how basically every communication on the Internet is based on public key crypto that we don't even think about, but I want to ask how you get your shared key to websites when you visit?
Do you use any tools like signal, telegram and so on?
My point isn't that public key systems are perfect, far from it. It's that it's wrong to say security and usability are contrary to one another.
People who think the public key solution is cumbersome are often comparing "no security" to "ideal security".
For public key to be secure from man in the middle you need a trusted out of band channel or attestation scheme.
For a symmetrical key system you need the same channel.
Without that channel public key has a message interaction where an attacker can swap in their key but is otherwise secure. The symmetric key system is entirely broken.
"Easy case" public key systems are usually a fair bit more secure than a similar level of effort in other schemes, and likewise a given level of security confidence is easier to get to with public key than a password.
Finally, and most importantly: your phone quite likely supports multiple levels of authentication.
You can get into my phone if you have my fingers. This let's you see my calendar, emails and (many) other things. It doesn't let you into all of my files, financial apps, or even device settings.
That's called force, and against your will.
That's just fundamentally not understanding how the terms work. A coerced action, or one taken under duress, is not taken of ones own free will.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/duress
If I'm not alive I don't really care if they get the contents of my phone. My survivors can go through the same process I would for reversing a fraudulent transaction.
And you're picturing a criminal subduing me and then just crouching over my body and figuring out what financial apps I have and how to use them?
What's their game plan here? Most stolen phones are resold, not used to access their contents.
If you point a weapon at me in a way that would compel me to help you unlock my phone with fingerprint or face unlock, I promise you it would not be any harder for you to get me to unlock the device with the pin.
I'm on a relatively boring android phone and biometrics are only available in circumstances where it's already vaguely confident it's you.
Miss the fingerprint reader by too much? It's now a pin unlock. Haven't used pin recently enough? No biometrics.
It's pretty far from being replaced, considering I seem to need to use the pin on the lock screen several times a day at least.
Have you ever had your phone searched by the police or at the border? I haven't, but I have had someone try to unlock my phone before.
I'd contend most people have a threat model that puts opportunistic access by household members or someone watching them enter their passcode and then snatching the phone and running above border patrol search.
While you can't change your biometrics, walk me through why that matters. I'm not sharing my biometrics outside of the device, and you can't submit them remotely, so if you lift a print off of something it doesn't really get you much without also taking the phone. Once you're there, you're a bit beyond the typical phone thief in terms of threat.
The most common vulnerability is having an absurdly weak password, pin or unlock pattern. For those people biometrics is a vast improvement specifically because it's both secure against likely threats, and it's just as easy as hitting 5 four times in a row.
Every method has trade offs, and there's nothing to gain by pretending otherwise. Likewise, I don't think I would ever say "never use something", except for some contrived examples.
Totally true. That's not the common threat most people need to guard against however. Additionally, at least on Android, the device is relatively eager to force pin usage if the stars don't align for biometrics
Why?
It's not like they're literally using your face or fingerprint as a password. They're not even storing them, just a hash tied to an hsm key.
Why do you think that? Public key authentication systems are invariably more secure, and a wide variety are also simpler for the end user to use.
It's a misconception that they are in opposition to each other. Why would they be? One's about knowing who's doing something and the other is about how much effort it takes to do it.
The disagreement about a comparison to Nazis isn't about what the Nazis did, or that doing what they did would justify comparison, it's that I fundamentally disagree that taking down an allegedly libelous document is the same as mass murder.
I'm familiar with the horrors of the Nazis, you don't need to rehash.
I'm not sure how a German court case about denying Nazi crimes has bearing on a theoretical UK court case about if an organization has a specific policy position.
You earlier mentioned that the case could be a PR and fundraising opportunity.
Have you considered if you would want them to fight it if they thought it would do the opposite? What if they just spent a bunch of money giving the assholes a platform to spew hate?
Oh, I didn't say it was acceptable or desirable. I guess that's why the downvotes.
I think that's what they're advertising, as opposed to the people who think it's a deep plot to hook kids or something.
The free shared group calendar that comes with my stuff is all I use for a similar setup. Only thing I wish it had was a better ability to notify me if someone else added an event, since I regularly have conversations with contractors or whatever where I say anytime should be fine, and then immediately have to backpedal when checking the calendar.
But for clarification, I don't want what I described and I don't think they can actually do most if any of what they imply with these backhanded advertisments.
I just think "manage the schedules of a busy family" is one of the most tried "wholesome" advertising gambits.
I think they'd need to argue she said something about them, not just an action or statement.
Be funny for someone to sue over defamation for being accused of defamation though.
Retracting a report that they didn't think they could legally defend in court is a long way from justifying comparisons to Nazis.
Personally I would have rathered that they removed the report and released the information from the perspective of the US chapter with mildly revamped wording, but I get the course of action.
I'm not convinced it would be a pr coup or net financial win for them to publicly be unable to prove that "gender critical" organizations are defacto anti-rights in general, or that Rowling's sexual violence charity that was mentioned in specific was.
When the argument is that they over generalized and named organizations as guilty by association without justification, they wouldn't be arguing trans rights or equality but specific public policy stances.
Appearing to argue that a rape support center is in violation of human rights by catering to cis women isn't going to be the pr coup.
It doesn't matter that they're clearly anti trans and founded because the alternative didn't exclude trans women and had a trans director: amnesty would need to show they were an an anti rights organization.
I'm not saying that I like that they took down the report or apologized. Nor am I saying that any of the groups are accepting or good.
I'm just saying that Rowling and the stupid uk libel laws are better targets for ire.
Jk Rowling's? The UK government that places the burden of proof in libel cases on the defendent to prove that their statement is true in a court of law, while the plaintiff just has to show their reputation was damaged?
I'm not at all a fan of them removing the report, but it's not exactly a mystery who else you could blame for the situation.
The actual, boring answer is because family calendars can get complicated quickly and then ore people are involved and updating them the easier it is to miss something. So the use case of "will help you keep track of what the fuck is going on" is a legitimate advertising angle.
In an absurd sense, it's similar to the "oops, we forgot to put the safeties on and our super clever bot totally autonomously did something insanely sophisticated. Don't worry, we fixed it though". Anything sophisticated enough to stalk and harass a journalist is more than capable of planning a meeting.
Anything capable of putting together a podcast about everything going on is more than capable of actually sending you a reliable reminder for a doctor's appointment for your second kid that you weren't told about, or letting you know that you're not free Wednesday at 1 when talking with the repair person.
I'm not sure that's been extensively tested in courts. The document you referenced below appears to be as-yet not officially published, so I don't believe it actually qualifies as an official position yet, but the bigger issue is that it's untested in court.
This thread is a response to an AI court case where the ruling was that training on copy written works is fair use.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/us-judge-approves-15-billion-anthropic-copyright-settlement-with-authors-2025-09-25/
Regardless, you do make good points and I think we agree that the end state is "they shouldn't be able to do that". I have concerns that using existing standards that take copying too literally results in some unintended ambiguity, and situations where AI training is incidentally blocked, but so is stuff like "opening a news article on a computer", which does the same things the copyright office report highlights as infringement.
I think we'd be in a much more agreeable place if we just legally state that a commercial AI tools training isn't fair use. That lets you have nuance like "search engine? It's a statistical model, but not generative: allowed. AI agent? Statistical model that's generating content as opposed to classification or ranking: not allowed".
It definitely does have the meaning of making an analog signal discrete, and DVDs are digital in that sense.
There's also the sense of serializing or enumerating something into a format more flexible or amenable to computer manipulation. More briefly: to put it on a computer.
For some things it's super obvious: a vinyl record has a groove you can see, and you digitize it by sampling the output of the wiggle: analog.
The contents of an SD card are invisible and the only way to observe them is via a computer, where they're already presented in a flexible format: not analog.
Then you have fuzzy things: a printed picture that was taken with a digital camera. Grab a magnifying glass and you can see that it's got blocks of quantized color, and isn't continuous. You digitize the photo by shining light on it and capturing the bounce.
Optical media is a disc with a groove in it that you read by shining a light on it to capture the bounce. Instead of a horizontal wiggle though it's pits creating an interference pattern with a laser.
It's digital because it's quantized information that it stores. It needs to be digitized to work with easily because the format is often read-only or write once. It's analog because the pits themselves are continuous and the system spends surprising amount of nuance correcting errors from things like fingerprints and dust.
Books are plainly analog, even though they're composed almost entirely of discrete, quantized units of structured information. Sometimes even with a lookup table and index for faster search!
Magnetic tape stores analog audio by varying the strength of a magnet with the audio signal. It stores digital information by only setting the magnet to specific strengths. Same for VHS or cable Internet.
To make a long ramble short: digitize also means to stick it on a computer, owing to efforts to digitize things often being focused on items that aren't continuous, like text.
Har har.
Different senses of the word digital. The dvd is digital as in "made discrete and not analog".
I meant in the sense of "to move off of fixed use physical media and translate to a format more agnostic to storage medium or conducive to transfer and immediate processing".
More succinctly: to copy something to a storage medium that's harder to loose under the couch.