Face ID: One of the most interesting features of Apple's iPhone X is the way you can unlock it. The new Face ID feature uses the iPhone to project and analyze more than 30,000 invisible dots to create a depth map of your face, which is then read by an infrared camera to finally unlock your phone.
Even in the dark. Even when you grow a beard.
Smartphones are a part of our digital lives, and anything that can improve security is welcome. It should be noted that there are still people who don't use a passcode to lock their phones. But Apple promises that using facial recognition will be more secure than using fingerprints.
"The chance that a random person could look at your iPhone X and unlock it using Face ID is approximately one in 1,000,000 (compared to 1 in 50,000 for Touch ID)," Apple says.
The use of the technology has worried some, but some of their security concerns are perhaps a bit overblown: in the case of the iPhone X's authentication system, there is no single database for hackers to tap into because the biometric data is stored, and encrypted, on the device itself.
However, there are still some questions:
For a smartphone we can argue that a fingerprint is actually the easiest password replacement: it's less controversial than using your face and perhaps even faster.
Facial recognition on smartphones will be slow. You have to pick up the device before you can look at it. So unlocking with a fingerprint reader on the back (or side) makes it very easy to unlock the phone as you pull it out of your pocket or pick it up from the desk.
Finger or face?
Using a fingerprint, by the time I look at the phone it's already unlocked: facial recognition seems to be a step behind that, because I have to look at the phone before it opens.
Of course, these are criticisms of a specific implementation that Apple used, but it could become a bigger issue. The way facial recognition is used could become a standard way of identifying people in general, not just when we unlock our smartphones.
If we start using facial recognition in a controlled scenario, like unlocking our phones, we encourage the use of the technology elsewhere, where we may have less control.
It's not hard to imagine how facial recognition technology, along with the extensive surveillance systems installed in most major cities, will kill anonymity.
This may or may not be a good thing, but it's the kind of change that creeps into our society when we should be talking more about protecting our privacy.
And OK, yes, state surveillance exists and will exist. What will happen when the same technology, another kind of Face ID, starts to be used in Super Markets, always for the convenience of the customer..
