Phone makers could easily increase security by making it harder to match the partial fingerprint, he said, “but the average phone company is more worried about you being annoyed<br />that you have to put your finger against the phone two or three times than they are with someone breaking into it.”<br />Adding a larger fingerprint sensor would also decrease the risk, Dr. Boehnen said.<br />When a user sets up fingerprint security on an Apple iPhone or a phone<br />that runs Google’s Android software, the phone typically takes eight to 10 images of a finger to make it easier to make a match.<br />Phone makers have acknowledged that fingerprint sensors are not foolproof, but said<br />that the ease of touching a finger to unlock a phone meant that more users actually turned on security features instead of leaving their phones unlocked — a common habit in the early days of smartphones.<br />“If all I want to do is take your phone and use your Apple Pay to buy stuff, if I can get into 1 in 10 phones, that’s not bad odds.”<br />Full human fingerprints are difficult to falsify, but the finger scanners on phones are so small that they read only partial fingerprints.
