Be Careful With Fingerprint Unlock

Or I would even call it wierdness in the morning.

Today, I woke up a bit later than usual.

My phone, a Redmi Note 9 Pro, apparently wasn’t too keen on waking up itself and decided it wasn’t the case to wake me up at the time my alarms where set the night before.

Luckily I took a look at the alarm clock as soon as I was awake and it wasn’t that bad.

The phone was like frozen during startup showing the logo in the initial boot process.

I quickly rebooted it and after a while (I think it’s funny how long any computer takes to boot up today) the phone woke up and after entering my PIN and unlock code it looked fine.

It just annoyed me a bit to do all my morning routine in a bit of a rush because of the alarm not ringing.

I just went on with my day and drove my car to work, taking a mental note to double check this evening before falling asleep to the alarm is set and the phone is charging. Maybe test the alarm turning it on too before if I remember to do it.

The first half of the morning went on fine at work. I went outside for a quick smoke and coffee break on a balcony with my colleague and went back inside after a while.

That’s when it actually happened, with IT being the beginning of the robot uprising.

I put the phone in my shorts pocket after checking the news on it, inadvertently putting my thumb (I guess) over the on/off button, which is also the fingerprint scanner…

I’ve always found it a bit annoying that when you turn on the screen it also unlocks the phone at the same time.

The location of the fingerprint sensor always bothered me to be honest. The other phone had the sensor in the back near the camera, which personally I think was a bit more ergonomic, but it still calls you to fiddle around it and all over the camera lens glass so that it was always dirty when I needed to take a picture. Anyway…

After a while (one and half, a couple of hours at most) I went to check the time on the phone and looking at it I found out a couple of weird things…

1. My WhatsApp status (I didn’t even know you could set a status on it) was changed to an animated GIF of a cheeky girl.
2. A black picture with the text “00” was sent to my sister (I guess it was dark inside my pockets).
3. The description of a group chat was changed (probably to ee, but I can’t tell exactly because WhatsApp just notifies the description change, not what was changed to).
4. A person I haven’t heard in like 8 years (not that I had anything against her, we just went different directions) was added to the group chat I mentioned on the previous point on the list. Her name begins with an A so she was a pretty easy target up on the list of person to add.
5. The description of the now famous, or infamous, group chat was changed other 2 times. The second time for sure to ee, that’s what I found afterwards.
6. The on screen keyboard was floating over the top of the screen, in a smaller size than usual.

Yeah, so something funny to fix up.

I removed from the group the new contact, and had to explain and apologize to her, my sister and all the other in the group chat about what happened.

It has been pretty funny, and a bit sad, I felt like when you’re an old guy and you don’t understand a technology enough and you fuck around with it and mess it up and then get mad about it, besides the fact that it was actually your fault in the end.

So, well, be careful when you think your phone is turned off, I suggest to not enable the fingerprint unlock besides being useful sometimes, the downsides are way more annoying than unlock your phone that one time you actually needed to make a call.

Have a good day.