My friend opened my phone

Last night I was showing my new The Google Pixel 6a smartphone of my friend Buffalo. The phone was off when I handed it to him. Then all of a sudden, he was staring at my home screen. He had put his finger on the part of the screen where the phone is scanning fingerprints and the phone is unlocked.

I panted. My heart beat quickened.

“Buffalo”! I said. “This is not what is supposed to happen.” Press the power button to lock the phone and try to unlock it again. It worked. My eyes bulged. He did it over and over again, surprising our close friends. Fortunately no one else out there was able to unlock my phone.

I’ve searched online and found that other people have had similar issues since the phone became available last month. some people They were able to unlock the Pixel 6a using fingers that were not registered in the device settings. And the two her youtube channels proven People can unlock the Pixel 6a even if they don’t have their fingerprints saved in the phone.

As a general rule, both consumers and corporate workers want to keep what’s on their devices private. People expect their devices to not inadvertently allow access to strangers or even friends or family members. This means that this problem is not the best thing to happen to Google’s fast-growing Pixel series of phones An apple iPhones and countless Android phones.

Google shipped 800,000 smartphones in the U.S. in the second quarter, up about 230% over a year ago, according to estimates published Monday by the technology industry research group. Canalys. Canales said Apple, Samsung, Motorola and TCL ship more phones in North America than Google.

The $449 Pixel 6a has the same Google Tensor chip as the Pixel 6 from 2021, which Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google subsidiary Alphabet, told analysts in April was “the fastest-selling Pixel phone ever.”

The Pixel line of phones like the Pixel 6a aims to offer similar technology to Google’s flagship models at a lower price.

People can set up the Pixel 6a without enabling the fingerprint unlock feature, but it’s still a popular passcode alternative.

“The under-display fingerprint sensor on the Pixel 6a has been tested to meet industry standards for security where the probability of an unconfirmed fingerprint match is 1 in 50,000 attempts,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC in an email. “We’re constantly making improvements to fingerprint performance, stability, and reliability, and users should make sure they’re running the latest version of Android 13.”

Apple says on His website The probability of two separate fingerprints matching a single finger registered to Touch ID is one in 50,000. The odds of correctly guessing a person’s four-digit passcode to unlock the device, for comparison, are one in 10,000.

Authentication issues have appeared on phones from other manufacturers that have relied on facial recognition. Family members who weren’t quite alike were able to unlock Apple’s iPhone X in 2017In 2019, people discovered that it was possible to unlock the Samsung Galaxy S10 with a photo of the owner of the phone.

Although it is rare, I still find it intimidating that someone else’s fingerprint has unlocked my phone. If you’re also worried about that, you might just want to rely on another authentication method instead.

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