Nowadays, fingerprint technology is applied to all kinds of electronic devices allowing you to unlock pretty much anything with just a touch. This, on the whole, helps make life extremely convenient. Think back to when Touch ID was released on Apple’s very own iPhone, life changing right? Right. However, in daily life, it’s inevitable that we will leave fingerprints on objects around us. Think about the edges of glass that we’ve touched, fingerprints on screens of electronic devices, and so on.

Does it ever make you wonder, what happens to our fingerprints? Are they secure? Can they be stolen when exposed? And… Why are there always cases of false fingerprint identification? The deeper concern is, is the fingerprint technology used by electronic devices safe enough? Are there ways to prevent fingerprint theft?

“But what if, your fingerprint reader was safer?”

When choosing such technology for devices to be fitted on door locks, or other places that need to be kept safe. The biggest security based issues we are faced with tends to be: “Can we identify fake fingerprints?”. Because the last thing you want is for someone to copy your own fingerprint ID and then run riot in your home.

So what’s available on the market now?

First of all, the two types of fingerprint recognition sensors widely used in door locks are optical identification protocols, and capacitive sensors.

Optical identification is an earlier form of fingerprint identification technology. Its technical principle is to scan the fingerprint on the finger by emitting light, obtain fingerprint information, and then compare the fingerprint information in the database to see if it is consistent.

Optical fingerprint reading can also correctly identify fingerprints, but it reaches the epidermis layer of the skin to identify the shape and structure of fingerprints and gets information this way. It can be simply understood as: transferring fingerprints to the processor like taking photos.

Therefore, the security level of optical fingerprint identification is slightly lower and doesn’t cost as much. It is usually used in attendance systems like clock-in devices, or other ordinary types of fingerprint identification equipment.

SwitchBot Keypad Touch, on the other hand, uses capacitive sensors. This reflects the concave and convex of fingerprints, showing different characteristics such as capacitive changes, and then detects these characteristics to reflect a three-dimensional structure your fingerprints and fingers and obtains fingerprint information with more biological based attributes.

These attributes can also be understood as things that only human fingerprints would have that can be identified by, for example, body temperature.

Capacitive sensors found in SwitchBot Keypad Touch are of a much higher quality, and generally used in mobile phones, banks, vaults, safes and other more privacy sensitive areas. Making it impossible to unlock using fake fingerprints.

In a deeper level, if the lawless person wants to forge the owner’s fingerprint to open the door, he not only needs to obtain the owner’s fingerprint, but also forge a fingerprint pattern similar to an organism. The forgery difficulty coefficient is directly higher than the level of the optical fingerprint head. By comparison, the biometric fingerprint identification technology of SwitchBot Keypad Touch is more secure.

Stealing fingerprints? It ain’t that easy pal.

So how hard is it to forge a fingerprint? Well, the answer in short, is quite hard.

For starters, to accurately obtain fingerprints, professionals need to use high-precision fingerprint film making instruments. In the process of obtaining fingerprints, it is also necessary to ensure that the fingerprint information is intact to improve the fingerprint recognition rate. Step by step, the difficulty met with making false fingerprints just gets higher and higher. This way, it is hundreds of times more difficult for criminals to forge the false fingerprint of the owner rather than just trying to pry open your lock.

So, it’s pretty safe to say, as mentioned earlier, when considering that our most important decision is to give priority to fingerprint identification technology that is more secure, you’ll be spending less time worrying about if your fingerprint data is safe, and more time sipping on a nice beverage all within the comfort of your own home.