Don’t enable your iPhone’s ‘Touch ID’ if you have something to hide

Memo to crooks: Avoid fingerprint♚ IDs — especially when it comes to the iPhone.

While the FBI was unable to crack the passcode on the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, the feds a𒅌re having a far easier time busting the criminally stupid who use Apple’s fingerprint-driven “Touch ID” sensor.

When the newfangled feature was introduced to the iPhone 5s in 2013, it was billed as a security enhancement — a 🌊beefier protection from would-be sn𒁃oops than a numerical passcode.

But the technology ba💙ckfired badly for an accused LA gangster in February when a federal judge ordered the suspect’s 29-year-old girlfriend to use ౠher fingerprint to open her iPhone for investigating cops.

“If you don’t want the cops riffling throu🧔gh your phone, better use the passcode than a fingerprint to lock it,” said David Shapiro, 🥃a law professor at Northwestern University in Chicago.

The judge’s move — unnoticed even as the epic court battle raged between Apple and the FBI over access to the San Bernardino🅺 terrorist Syed Farook’s iPhone — allowed the feds to sidestep thorny legal issues they had faced in the notorious Farook case.

Here’s the rub: Unlike a passcode, a fingerprint caജn’t be considered a form of speech. As such, accused criminals can’t invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid pressing flesh to open the🎉ir phones.

“The passc🥂ode requires an act of providing information out of your mind, whereas a fingerprint isn’t a statement of any ♊sort, so it’s hard to see that as self-incrimination,” Shapiro said.

Some legal experts and privacy advocates disagree, arguing that forcing a suspect to open a phone with a fingerprint෴ is akin to producing information and authenticating its contents.

Either way, the fact that smartphones are accumulating unprecedented details about people’s lives could eventually result in tig💎hter restrictions for police looking to obtain search warrants for them.

“Courts are starting to reevaluate some long-settled legal issues because of the notion that smartphones are just different in the amount of information they expose abꦦout our lives,” says Jennifer Rodgerꦡs, executive director at the Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity at Columbia Law School.

A Virginia judge ruled in 2014 that police can force users to unlock their phones with their fingerprints, but the case in February appears to have been the first time federal law enforcement has u🌞sed that power.

So, should 𒁃smart 𝓡crooks disable fingerprint-ID altogether and deal with the hassle of passcodes?

“For sure!” says Rodgers.