Since the iPhone 5s was announced, complete with its fingerprint detector, comments have been awash with people assuming that using it will mean your fingerprints reported back to the NSA. The fact that Apple have said otherwise seems to hold no sway – the fingerprint data is held on the phone and is never sent anywhere else, they say.

The thing is, I believe them. We didn’t know about the NSA connections to Apple servers because, well, we can’t see it – unless you have some secret access to Apple servers that most of us won’t. But if Apple say that the fingerprint data doesn’t leave the phone, with all the people able to “jailbreak” and analyse the OS, along with those network experts who will be able to monitor any data leaving the phone, I suspect that they wouldn’t be able to get away with it if they were.

And, let’s be perfectly honest here, is you believe that the NSA can do this, they’re probably also tracking you via GPS and WiFi, listening to your conversations, reading your email, messages and passwords and probably watching you via your camera as well. Suddenly, having your fingerprints doesn’t appear to be that important.

Besides, any visitors to the US now have their fingerprints recorded anyway, so changes are the NSA has them anyway 😉