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Face ID is replacing Touch ID on the new iPhone X
- mzs 9y agoThis has not been well thought out for part of the world. https://www.pri.org/stories/2012-08-13/expand-job-opportunities-saudi-arabia-plans-women-only-work-zone https://www.pri.org/stories/2012-08-13/expand-job-opportunit...
- ebspelman 9y agothe prevalence of surgical masks in China might also be a challenge
- monkmartinez 9y agoSunglasses and hats too!
- ihuman 9y agoApple has said it will work with glasses and hats
- nicky0 9y agoBut not sunglasses.
- hellofunk 9y agoNo, Apple has explicitly stated that hair style, glasses, hats, etc have no impact on the face detection.
- tetraodonpuffer 9y agoso does it mean that to unlock the phone I just have to knock you out and put some sunglasses on you?
- hellofunk 9y agoHow would that be any different than knocking someone out and using their finger for the Touch ID?
- tetraodonpuffer 9y agoexactly the same, which means FaceID is not that much more secure unless as part of the authentication process you have to smile on cue or something
- koolba 9y agoWell for one thing it'd be a hell of a lot more work to cut off a guy's head vs. just his thumbs (if you want to unlock again later).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dschiffner 9y agoCan still use a passcode
- elif 9y agoThe passcode doesn't let you get rid of the hideous screen cut-out, which seems to be primarily for this lock.
- M4v3R 9y agoYou would still need it for the normal front facing camera (look at the Essential Phone).
- amdavidson 9y agoThe cut-out also has the speaker, front facing camera, and ambient light sensor, or would you go without those as well?
- bambax 9y agoWhat about twins? Does touch ID even work with twins?
- AceJohnny2 9y agoNo. They even brought up Spock and Evil Goatee Spock to mention that twins defeat it. (I say "defeat". Schiller just said the chances of a false positive were higher with twins than the 1/1,000,000 base rate [compared with his claim of 1/50,000 for TouchID])
- saurik 9y agoThis was explicitly brought up by the presenter (though through the premise of an "evil twin" and a photo of Spock from Mirror, Mirror) and they said you should consider a password.
- return0 9y agothat sounds like a lot of inconvenience
- TCM 9y agoI am a twin and me and my brother managed to fool windows hello. I plan on going to an Apple Store with my brother to see if FaceID can't be fooled.
- amag 9y agoOh, this is very interesting! Please keep us posted!
- cynix 9y agoTwins shouldn't be a problem. Even the ghetto facial recognition implementation in the AliPay app (a Chinese PayPal clone) can tell twins apart. Surely Apple can do an even better job.
- synaesthesisx 9y agoInfrared should pass through thin layers of clothing with ease.
- return0 9y agoit's all a plot to make women remove their scarves
- jaytaylor 9y agoWhy'd Apple choose to make the iPhone X out of stainless steel? Titanium, for example, would be half the weight and much more interesting..
- hiven 9y agoI think steel is easier to manufacture and more abundant.
- TremendousJudge 9y agoBut it's supposed to be the no cost-cutting, ultra premium version of the iPhone. It costs a thousand dollars. They could've used titanium
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Grazester 9y agoYet Apple is still probably going to be making higher margins on this phone that a $300 Android phone manufacturer
- askafriend 9y agoThey are supply constrained by many of the materials and parts that are used on this phone (OLED screens, for example). You can bet that they will bring the price down to earth when they can manufacture in mass quantity. You've got to remember they sell nearly 50 million of these things every quarter. They don't just appear out of thin air.
- koolba 9y agoMaybe saving it for the iPhone X2. It could also have pre drilled holes for setting gemstones.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
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- beauzero 9y agoI know it is supposed to be "local" or "onboard" only with the new processor but...mildly spooky.
- X86BSD 9y agoIt's stored in the secure enclave.
- wt85 9y agoGreat way to integrate the government backdoor without actually publicly saying it. Catch the perp, get full access to the device. -Apple
- jgillette 9y agoI guess that's why the added the 5 press power button which disables the Touch/Face ID features
- larvaetron 9y agoWhich is great if you're able to do that before someone snatches your phone and aims the camera at your face to unlock it.
- nicky0 9y agoWere you under a rock for the whole Apple vs FBI thing?
- k__ 9y agoso instead of stealing your finger print it's now enough to get a picture?
- make3 9y agoYou really didn't read the article did you. Second paragraph says "Apple says the facial scan is so accurate there’s now only a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of another random person’s face being able to unlock your phone. This is much better than the 1 in 50,000 error rate for Touch ID. And no, holding a photo up of someone can’t unlock their phone – nor can a Hollywood-grade face mask, which (shown below) were used by Apple’s engineering teams to train the feature."
- k__ 9y agoI'll wait till the CCC had their take on this...
- ceejayoz 9y agoNo, it's projecting dots onto the face for 3D mapping, and has an IR camera (which I'd guess maps facial heat).
- kuschku 9y agoA non-conclusive list of places where this will be an issue: China, Japan, S.E.A.: Surgical masks against smog, or to avoid spreading germs. Northern Europe, Canada, Northern US: Winter clothing that covers the face to avoid the cold temperatures Middle East: Religious clothing for women hiding their faces. Anywhere with hot summers: Sunglasses covering the entire eyes, making it impossible to see if you’re looking at the screen (which is a requirement for FaceID unlock).
- M4v3R 9y ago> Anywhere with hot summers: Sunglasses covering the entire eyes, making it impossible to see if you’re looking at the screen (which is a requirement for FaceID unlock). I wonder if the IR sensor can actually see through the sunglasses?
- _ph_ 9y agoMight vary with the make of the sunglasses, but I took an IR photo of a colleague wearing sunglasses, and on the photo the glasses were completely transparent. So the FaceID has a good chance to work with sunglasses.
- kuschku 9y agoThat’s a bad sign, usually good sunglasses also block IR and UV light, as the eye only closes the iris based on visible light, but can still be damaged by too much exposure in IR or UV bands.
- geoelectric 9y agoWhat are some examples of sunglasses that block IR? When I looked around earlier (curious about the same question) it didn't seem to be a standard feature at all.
- umeshunni 9y agoSo, basically it works only in Northern California.
- whipoodle 9y agoLet's just make sure we're talking about how it will actually work, not what we're guessing based on some tech blogs and today's presentation.
- noncoml 9y agoYou know what would be extremely useful at this point? An actual demo from a reporter, and not only for the FaceID, but in general for how the phone works without a home button.
- kevinavery 9y agoThey say that Face ID falsely recognizes 1 in 1,000,000 people (1 in 50,000 for Touch ID), but it's a lot easier to find the people who look like a given target to unlock their phone. Could be an issue if a mutual friend knows someone who looks enough like you to unlock your phone.
- bluetomcat 9y agoIt's not clear whether the false positives would mainly be among "similar faces", or it probably could happen due to signature collisions on entirely different faces? Like, a weakness in the algorithm which causes two entirely different faces to hash to a very similar signature.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoJust because someone "looks like" your target to you doesn't mean they're similar enough to fool whatever algorithms the iPhone is using.
- infogulch 9y agoYes. So how much do look-alikes change that number? It's 1/1M for strangers. Is it 1/10k for family members? 1/100 for close look-alikes? The difference between FaceID and TouchID is that you don't have pictures of millions of people's fingerprints available publicly online...
- kevinavery 9y agoExactly. Someone mining Facebook could build a directory of doppelgängers near each person. A little social engineering could get a bystander to unlock the target's phone without them even realizing they are facilitating a crime.
- IshKebab 9y agoAh, HN-level paranoia.
- return0 9y agoWhat about beards? And honestly why is this a big deal? sounds as easy to fool as a fingerprint, and is still less secure than a password
- davidiach 9y agoThat's just one of the ways to unlock the phone. You can use a password when traveling for eg.
- kdamken 9y agoAnd I thought that removing the headphone jack for the 7 was the worst possible decision they could make. Does every design meeting at Apple start with: "What beloved feature can we remove and replace with something no one fucking cares about?"
- mzs 9y agodemo fails here https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/9/12/16296912/apple-iphone-x-face-id-demo-fail https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/9/12/16296912/a...
- freeflight 9y agoFace recognition for authentification has been around for a quite a while, let's see how robust Apple could make it. It's still a weird future we're heading towards. It makes me wonder what legal consequences it's gonna have once this kind of technology is widespread among all smartphones with high identification reliability? What's to stop anybody from combining different biometric identification systems into one device? A combination of Touch ID/Face ID, coupled with some voice recognition and whatever else is possible with biometrics, would probably be able to identify the user with a very high certainty. Smartphones are also increasingly being turned into an "ID card replacement", even banks have been pushing to use them as a replacement for CC/Debit cards for years. Which kinda makes sense considering how not every country has ID cards but a vast number of people on this planet have smartphones or at least mobile phones. If one wanted to index the whole human population of planet Earth, it would probably a good start to "just" collect the SIM/IMEI data from all mobile phones in circulation. [0] It's still a quite dystopian idea of a future, where the identity of a person is solely defined and legitimized by their smartphone/mobile device. Scary thing being: We are closer to this kind of future than it might seem; the aptly named US program "Skynet" uses mobile metadata for targeting selection of drone strikes, has been doing so for quite a while [1] [0] https://www.gsmaintelligence.com/ https://www.gsmaintelligence.com/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKYNET_(surveillance_program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKYNET_(surveillance_program)
- crazygringo 9y agoGenuine question: will identical twins be able to unlock each others' phones? Or do they actually have enough differences that the phone can pick up on, even if people can't tell them apart?
- codazoda 9y agoThey have enough differences. I've only known one set of identical twins, back in high school, and at first I thought they looked the same. After a while, however, you can recognize the differences. I suspect a phone has enough data points that it sees them as different people.
- xvaier 9y agoDuring the presentation, they mentioned that if you have an evil twin, you should probably use a passcode, so I'm assuming that the acceptable range for recognizing is larger than the ranges of difference between identical twins.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]