[holymadness]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

You also might want to consider this:

'Not an actual image' can be as little as 'other file format'. And with an iPhone in hand a person has everything they need to figure out how the fingerprint data relates to an actual fingerprint.

In your haste to scaremonger, you have quoted an article about extracting RAW image data from the iPhone's camera sensor (not its fingerprint sensor). Quoted in bad faith, I might add, since the iPhone camera has APIs and SDKs that are specifically designed to share data with apps, which is not the case for the fingerprint sensor.

Let me explain something to you about your worry that someone "with an iPhone in hand... has everything they need" to gain access to your fingerprints. Stealing and then hacking someone's iPhone to get at their fingerprints is literally the stupidest, least efficient way of doing so. Newsflash: you leave your fingerprints everywhere you go, every single day. Thousands of them. On your computer mouse, your book covers, your cereal box, your coffee cup, your car steering wheel, your desk, your chair's arm rests, your doorknob, your kitchen faucet, your briefcase, your condiment jars. You even leave them all over the outside of your smartphone. It takes ten seconds to dust and tape a surface and walk away with a perfect print. Forensic technicians have been doing it for over a century.

Users that are against using a passcode won't be able to use the fingerprint scanner without one so I don't see how this would help convincing them to get security.

This is a rather obtuse interpretation of motives. If someone's reason for forgoing a passcode is the inconvenience of having to enter it every time they unlock the phone, then there is a great deal of motivation to use the fingerprint scanner.

And it shows that Apple knows that the fingerprint scanner can be circumvented.

This is a hysterical "damned if you do, and damned if you don't" criticism. Apple has taken the precaution of adding an additional layer of security to a new feature and you see it as a bad thing. Time to get some perspective.