Party Vibe

The Chinese (who sell a lot of these fingerprint scanners) don’t use this kind because it can be insecure!

We use the Chinese ones at work for clocking in/out of staff – not for any sinister purpose but simply because passkeys, ID cards etc are easily forgotten or mislaid whereas a staff member should normally have at least 10 fingers (this is East Anglia); of which two fingerprints are normally scanned.

Out of curiosity I downloaded the original “Chinglish” full instructions for one of the devices; it had a whole section about data protection , security and human rights (something I hadn’t expected to find) and explained in some depth (whilst still being comprehensible to a less technical users) that the algorithms and scanning used was not as strong as that sold to the Police or other govt agencies; it does not scan a whole finger but just the list of points and thus cannot be used to clone fingers.

Outside of the device; the dataset is of limited use unless it is simultaneously grabbed with the staff database (ours are airgapped and can only communicate in one direction to separate app to the rest of the staff database) – they even tell you to take care when setting the things up to preserve the users security/privacy. For some reason USA decided to do it the old fashioned and insecure way…

the one on my laptop doesn’t even work correctly when it is supposed to (I have since shut it off) – they (and biometrics as a whole) are not meant to be used as a substitute for other security measures.

The ones most commonly used by Chinese manufacturers for attendance/access control are a bit more secure than the laptop ones or the mobile phone based scanners. but are also prone to rejecting valid fingers even when correctly scanned in the database – this is a “fail secure” measure to prevent actual fingers being hacked (from those who are supposed to have the prints).

This sort of unpleasantness is less common nowadays outside of HK action movies but a lot of Chinese business people and their families in countries like Malaysia are still paranoid about things like that happening (when cops all have guns and other weapons the gangsters get more ruthless).