Darrell Etherington:

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.

This is very interesting. On the one hand, Samsung has addressed the biggest complaint about Apple’s Touch ID: that developers can’t use it for app security. That’s great and that’s where I hope Apple goes (as I have said before).

On the other hand Samsung seems to be completely ignoring the biggest concern about Touch ID: security. Senator Al Franken wrote Apple concerned about the security of the system, and yet Samsung releases bullet point info that is essentially meaningless and the response has been — well — crickets. This is very bad.