While there have been no hard studies done on the number of people expressing woes over the iPhone 5S Touch ID feature, some industry experts have been citing massive amounts of anecdotal evidence and over 23,000 views of Apple's Touch ID support forum as evidence of widespread distress, according to tech writer Timothy Stenovec.
“A poll on TUAW, a tech site that, like The Huffington Post, is owned by AOL, found that nearly a fifth of respondents said Touch ID worked for them less than 75 percent the time,” he wrote. “As one person in the Apple forum put it, Touch ID is 'not ready for primetime it seems.'”
Touch ID compares fingerprints to a numerical sequence that represents the scanned print of the phone's owner. A matching or close-to-matching print will unlock the phone. Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, told Stenovec that the software should be updated to accept more partial matches. He acknowledged that there is a downside to dialing back the security measures, but believes that the odds are still small enough to warrant reworking.
Currently, Apple's only solutions to Touch ID involve repeated attempts at scanning.
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