Plenty of people are afraid, and rightly so, of having their privacy breached, their identities stolen and their bank accounts drained.
For most, unfortunately, this is a kind of amorphous fear: since few people really understand how these attacks work and what countermeasures can be taken, they’re left just kind of hoping that it won’t happen to them.
Some identity theft schemes and other hacks are indeed really sophisticated and difficult to guard against. For the most part, though, what you need to worry about isn’t highly skilled Chinese hackers, but simple carelessness.
This can even include ordinary theft. The typical burglar might not be capable of exploiting the tax returns and bank statements stored on your digital devices, but chances are that they know someone who’s willing to pay for that kind of information. If someone of ill intent grabs this USB drive, however, they’ll find themselves out of luck: only your fingerprint can unlock the data secured on this drive.
The 128 gigabyte storage space is divided into two partitions: one encrypted with your fingerprint as the password, the other accessible to anyone who plugs it into a USB port. You can set the sizes of these partitions yourself and then use this drive both to transport or back up your personal data and to share less sensitive files with others.
The drive should work fine with most desktop operating systems, with one curious exception: it’s not possible to register the user’s fingerprint on Mac OS, though everything works fine once this has been done through Windows or Linux. We should mention, though, that there’s really no such animal as truly secure data storage.
Most fingerprint readers, including the one on this device, can be fooled with a little ingenuity and access to a copy of the original. Once the secure partition is mounted, it’s potentially accessible to any malware running on the host computer in any case. As the saying goes, though, all you can do is all you can do, and taking this relatively economical step towards better digital security is certainly better than doing nothing.
