What’s happened? Been using an iPhone for the last 2 years.

*on the power button.

My s10e had this, and it's the best IMO.

You can also swipe it to pull down the notification shade.

Ultrasonic fingerprint sensors aren't optical like the older under-screen ones. They don't need to go bright to get a reading.

This will not blind you.

The pixel 9 doesn't do the blinding thing anymore, and it works pretty well. This is apparently an even better version of that.

Don't disagree that on the back should be a thing too, the sensor on the back of the pixel 5 (IIRC?) was perfectly quick and had a few useful gestures you could use it for. I doubt it would increase the BOM much to just have both considering we're talking at phones that cost a grand

Like others have already said the 9 doesn't use light/optics but it still sucks compared to the one on the back. I use, but generally dislike the P9 finger print reader. I've gone so far as not using a screen protector to help that stupid thing. Still has way too many error reads

In theory the biometric data lives in a special part of the phone hardware that the software can't (generally) access. It's one of the big deals about phone biometrics - it should be really hard to leak.

AFAIU, the fingerprint stored on the phone is incredibly low quality, so I'm not sure how much value it would have.

Could they mess with that? Yes. Is there profit in getting a really low quality hash of every user's fingerprint? Probably not worth the hassle.

Probably not. IIRC for security the fingerprint data is stored and processed entirely in the reader, and not accessible at all by the OS. Of course they could have some sort of backdoor that allows collecting that data, but that would be a huge scandal waiting to happen.

I'm sorry, are you trying to suggest that Google is now going to store and track every Pixel user's biometrics? Why would you think that? What's changed now that suggests Google would even try that?