Comment 11 for bug 276384

The bug here seems to be the inability of gnome-keyring to work together with pam.

It seems that pam is configurable to allow various different "secrets" to be used for tasks such as logging in. Thus, pam can be configured to allow either a fingerprint or a password or both, as sufficient verification for login. However, the gnome-keyring stands apart from this: the only thing secret that will unlock the keyring is the password for that keyring (at least as far as I understand).

The security (or lack of) of fingerprint readers here is not the point. The same problem would apply to any other authentication method.