AI incident #372 · 22 July 2022

Users Reported Security Issues with Google Pixel 6a's Fingerprint Unlocking

Open on the AI Incident Database 3 news reports Snapshot 7 Sep 2026

What happened

Google Pixel 6a's fingerprint recognition feature was reported by users for security issues, in which phones were mistakenly unlocked by unregistered fingerprints.

Only the incident metadata is stored here. The underlying news reports are on the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0); use the links above to read them.

News reports (3)

Coverage catalogued by the AI Incident Database. Titles link to the original publisher; the text is not reproduced here.

22 Jul 2022
Pixel 6A: One REAL Problem!
youtube.com · Beebom · AIID #2178
25 Jul 2022
Pixel 6a Fingerprint Scanner Can't be Trusted
youtube.com · Geekyranjit · AIID #2177
26 Aug 2022
My friend was able to unlock my new Google phone with his fingerprint
cnbc.com · Jordan Novet · AIID #2168

Who was involved

Alleged deployer: Google
Alleged developer: Google
Alleged harmed party: Google Pixel 6A Users

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Risk domain: Privacy & Security
Risk subdomain: 2.2 AI system security vulnerabilities and attacks
Causal entity: AI
Intent: Unintentional
Timing: Post-deployment
Harm level: —
Sectors: —
Countries: —

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 2.2.

Privacy loss
"Privacy loss - Unwarranted exposure of an individual’s private life or personal data through cyberattacks, doxxing, etc."
A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)
Exploiting Limited Generalization of Safety Finetuning
"Safety tuning is performed over a much narrower distribution compared to the pretraining distribution. This leaves the model vulnerable to attacks that exploit gaps in the generalization of the safety training, e.g. usi...
Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)
Jailbreaks and Prompt Injections Threaten Security of LLMs
"LLMs are not adversarially robust and are vulnerable to security failures such as jailbreaks and prompt-injection attacks. While a number of jailbreak attacks have been proposed in the literature, the lack of standardiz...
Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)
“Model Psychology” Attacks
"LLMs are vulnerable to “psychological” tricks (Li et al., 2023e; Shen et al., 2023), which can be exploited by attackers. Examples include instructing the model to behave like a specific persona (Shah et al., 2023; Andr...
Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)
Attacking LLMs via Additional Modalities a
"LLMs can now process modalities other than text, e.g. images or video frames (OpenAI, 2023c; Gemini Team, 2023). Several studies show that gradient-based attacks on multimodal models are easy and effective (Carlini et a...
Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)
Vulnerability to Poisoning and Backdoors
"The previous section explored jailbreaks and other forms of adversarial prompts as ways to elicit harmful capabilities acquired during pretraining. These methods make no assumptions about the training data. On the other...
Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)
Model Attacks
Model attacks exploit the vulnerabilities of LLMs, aiming to steal valuable information or lead to incorrect responses.
Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)
Hardware Vulnerabilities
"The vulnerabilities of hardware systems for training and inferencing brings issues to LLM-based applications."
Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

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