I feel like this has always been the case? There’s not a lot of precedence to be sure, but people have been operating under that assumption for a long time.
That’s why, if you need to keep the cops from looking in your phone, you should use a password. Can’t be compelled to give a password.
The classic example is a safe. There’s tons of court precedence that you can be compelled to give the cops a physical key to unlock it if there is one, but you can’t be compelled to tell them the combo if it’s a dial lock.
Fingerprint unlocking is always secondary to there being a pin which is equivalent to a password.
As long as you turn your phone off before approaching/being approached by cops, or before they demand that you unlock it, you’ll be fine. You don’t even have to take it out of your pocket or look at it to turn it off, just hold the power button for a few seconds.
If you’re even more paranoid, enable the setting that requires a PIN code to reactivate the fingerprint unlock after 30 minutes or something.
Or force it to demand the pin after a single failure of the fingerprint unlock and then let your finger kind of slip when they tell you to unlock it.
There are countless ways to mitigate the risks here. You don’t have to forgo fingerprint unlock entirely.
I use tasker to automatically lockdown my phone if it experiences too much acceleration. I figure that if I’m being thrown to the ground, I probably want to lockdown my phone. A sharp tap on my pocket works pretty well too.
I feel like this has always been the case? There’s not a lot of precedence to be sure, but people have been operating under that assumption for a long time.
That’s why, if you need to keep the cops from looking in your phone, you should use a password. Can’t be compelled to give a password.
The classic example is a safe. There’s tons of court precedence that you can be compelled to give the cops a physical key to unlock it if there is one, but you can’t be compelled to tell them the combo if it’s a dial lock.
Fingerprint unlocking is always secondary to there being a pin which is equivalent to a password.
As long as you turn your phone off before approaching/being approached by cops, or before they demand that you unlock it, you’ll be fine. You don’t even have to take it out of your pocket or look at it to turn it off, just hold the power button for a few seconds.
If you’re even more paranoid, enable the setting that requires a PIN code to reactivate the fingerprint unlock after 30 minutes or something.
Or force it to demand the pin after a single failure of the fingerprint unlock and then let your finger kind of slip when they tell you to unlock it.
There are countless ways to mitigate the risks here. You don’t have to forgo fingerprint unlock entirely.
I use tasker to automatically lockdown my phone if it experiences too much acceleration. I figure that if I’m being thrown to the ground, I probably want to lockdown my phone. A sharp tap on my pocket works pretty well too.
Or instead of powering off, enable lockdown mode.
Finally someone that commented with a keyword I could search for in my settings (Samsung). Thank you!