The Fingerprint Scanner on the Samsung Galaxy S5 Will Be Accessible by Developers

Darrell Etherington, writing for TechCrunch:

It’s not yet clear exactly how Samsung stores and transmits its own fingerprint information to apps and services, but even opening up use of the scanner itself and fingerprint activity to third-party devs already marks a considerable departure from Apple’s approach. Samsung already announced a partnership with PayPal to allow fingerprints to enable payment verification for making purchases, and even that offers a fundamentally different philosophical take on how to use biometric information.

Maybe this is the right way to go. But how come so many people lost their shit over the clearly more-secure iPhone fingerprint sensor, and there’s not a peep about Samsung’s? Where’s the letter to Samsung from Senator Al Franken?

★ Wednesday, 26 February 2014