Just to show you how far our world has come, you can now file your taxes from your phone, complete with that little gadget being able to read your W-2 form by itself, and input all of the pertinent information.
You will not catch me using such an insecure device to file my federally-mandated-through-threat-of-force tithe, but… damn.
Enh – phones these days are as secure, more or less, than a PC (and, for that matter, more secure on the data end). Mailing a hardcopy 1040 is not particularly secure, all things considered.
It was exactly the physical security side of things that I was most concerned about, what with phones being carried everywhere, and thus forgotten everywhere… And there is that whole “not intended for complex returns” bit.
I’m fanatical about retention checks on my smartphone; and I secure mine with a unique complex password and have remote location and wipe capability. From a pure physical POV it’s as secure physically as my desktop machines, and somewhat more secure than my laptop.
“Not intended for complex returns” will stop me; I can’t recall the last time I did a 1040EZ. (I buy Turbotax every year). But there’s no particular reason Intuit couldn’t put an app out in the Market for that. (I’m assuing, for the nonce, that their web-based offering has UI issues with small screens, I’ve only used it once several years back).
At any rate, if it’s not here yet, it will be.
Yeah, but I somehow doubt you (and I, since I do the same thing, and have mine set up the same way) are what would be considered “average” smartphone users… Folks leave their phones in all kinds of random-assed locations all the time, and lord knows your tax return is a bit of PII.
Regardless, things like this on phones still blow me away… I remember watching Star Trek and lumping everything in the “not in my lifetime” category, and look at us now.
Still stuck here. On this rock. But with PADDs!
I’m actually a little surprised that smartphone vendors have not included fingerprint readers; Dell put one in a Windows Mobile (non-phone) PDA way back in 2005. And I really wonder why people are so careless with tracking a $500-$600 device (look at the unsubsidized cost of a regular cellphone, much less a PDA).
People leave their laptops laying around unattended, though; so what do I know. My PDA is a (small) computer, and I’ve accepted that, and intend to use the hell out of it.
Speaking from a little experience on the matter, all but the most-expensive, physically-larger fingerprint scanners are more-or-less useless… sure, they work for basic security levels, but weather, dirt, oils, skin condition, and so forth can make them go sideways, and they can be spoofed relatively easily. Just as well wait for that technology to reach its prime.
As for people… well, they are people. Case in point: the woman who could not be identified in the “falls into the mall fountain while texting” video is now suing the mall, and has therefor self-identified. That makes sense…
Hunh – the slide-across ones on laptops seem to work well enough, IME. And as for spoofing – that really falls into the movie plot security threat. It’s not going to keep out the determined, but it will keep the casual pickpocket out for long enough to wipe the device.
My job makes me consider the actions of dedicated intruders, so it leeches over
.
And, again, we are talking about smarter-than-average users… most people will not notice their phone being gone soon enough, or care soon enough, for the criminals in question to have already bypassed the fingerprint scanning system… What we really need is disk-wide encryption on top of some single-authentication (and, hell, why not dual if you want it?) system, which seems largely (and annoyingly) unavailable for Android platforms (and disfunctional for Apple ones).
Well, I did notice that you can’t do whole-card encryption of the SD card. That’s a fail, and one that WinMo *did* have, IIRC. (Never used it, due to some painful history with whole-disk encryption for personal files in Win2K).
And if the fingerprint scanners were as easily bypassed as all that, why are they so damned common on business-grade laptops? I’m genuinely curious, as they would then represent a hole in security on those things.
Apparently Android does not support encryption of the memory built into the phone, either… You can encrypt parts of your data, by way of third party apps, but nothing complete yet.
As for the fingerprint scanners on laptops, I always took them to be a simpler login method, rather than an honest security system – I guess it all depends on the software behind them, and whether they use that scan for authentication or encryption. For our purposes, though, we have to meet certain standards, and I do know those do not (though once I learned that, I confess to not bothering to look up the exact details as to why).