• fyf@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Do any phones even allow 4 digit Pins? Apple doesn’t, and my Samsung doesn’t.

    No one can force you to give up the PIN. They can threaten, and you may give in to that threat. But that isn’t forcing, that isn’t against your will.

    But, a criminal can get you to unlock your phone with biometrics against your will easily enough - brute strength, render you unconscious, or even dead.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      No one can force you to give up the PIN. They can threaten, and you may give in to that threat. But that isn’t forcing, that isn’t against your will.

      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

      • fyf@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        My comment was in reply to another saying a bad guy can force you to put your finger on the unlock sensor. There is no equivalent for pins.

        They can threaten, yes, and you can give into that threat. Yes, that would be against your will, but it still requires you to acquiesce or cooperate was my point. The can’t get the pin without you giving it.

        • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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          1 day ago

          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”.

          • fyf@lemmy.world
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            24 hours ago

            You aren’t wrong, but this discussion is mostly about edge cases. The average person, yea, they won’t have anything that is end of their world if a bad guy accesses it. But, that does mean there aren’t many phones that contain significantly more important data than you have.

            • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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              22 hours ago

              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.

              • fyf@lemmy.world
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                21 hours ago

                Nothing in that reply is even close to anything I’ve said. Don’t waste my time with stupidity or strawmen.

    • deliriousdreams@fedia.io
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      1 day ago

      My pixel allows a 4 digit pin. Mine is 7 digits but I also don’t use biometrics.

      Just had a look and it’s Face/Fingerprint/Pin/Swipe/Pattern/Password.