This isn't new information. Might be a higher circuit reaffirming it though.

I really think this depends largely on who you are and what you do with your phone. I have face recognition and fingerprint recognition both enabled on my phone. It's good enough to prevent a thief from gaining access to my device, and if law enforcement asked, there's nothing on my phone that could possibly be incriminating. Realistically, I'd have no issue just unlocking my phone and giving it to a police officer, although I do know well enough to always get a lawyer first. Biometrics add an extra layer of convenience; it's nice to just look at my phone and it unlocks. My concern personally is more about someone stealing my phone and accessing my accounts than self-incrimination.

If I ever was going to put myself in a situation where I'd run afoul of the authorities, I'd leave my phone at home anyway.

No.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California released a ruling that concluded state highway police were acting lawfully when they forcibly unlocked a suspect’s phone using their fingerprint.

The case didn’t get a lot of coverage, especially because the courts weren’t giving a blanket green light for every cop to shove your thumb to your screen during an arrest.

The ruling was also complicated by the fact that Payne was on parole at the time, back in 2021, when he was stopped by California Highway Patrol where he allegedly had a stash of narcotics including fentanyl, fluoro-fentanyl, and cocaine.

However, the panel said the evidence from his phone was lawfully acquired “because it required no cognitive exertion, placing it in the same category as a blood draw or a fingerprint taken at booking, and merely provided [police] with access to a source of potential information.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, has offered guides for best practices when attending protests, and one of those is to turn off your thumbprint or face unlock before you hit the street.

“The general consensus has been that there is more Fifth Amendment protection for passwords than there is for biometrics,” Andrew Crocker, the Surveillance Litigation Director at the EFF, told Gizmodo in a phone interview.

The original article contains 988 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!