The Debate About Apple’s Face ID: What The Giant Learnt From its Mistake

Apple’s much speculated iPhone X launch was no different. There was a flood of opinions, speculations, assumptions, judgement, notion, and everything possible that users and the spectators could do to find out what the giant is enrolling with the new iPhone version. The much-awaited wait ended with iPhone X’s launch with an impressive face-scanning technology.

Initially, the technique proved to be one remarkable in the mobile app development landscape, but later became a topic to debate. Apple’s face ID Recognition is one amazing technique for sure but fails to prove its efficiency for the user's aged under 13. There have been cases where face ID recognition accessed permission to twins have symmetric faces. iPhone X is Apple’s grand move after iPhone 8 launch.

Apple recently released a white paper on how the new system works and how it will hold up under the pressure. iPhone X stores information by reading user’s face and then creating a partial version to compare with the future prints. The feature has been developed incompletely purposefully for the sake of the safety of information even if the data is lost to unsecured hands. There is another random element where information is retained that makes it even harder for a person other than the genuine user to unlock the system.

The initial enrollment is the beginning of the process and this is another interesting news about the giant’s face recognition technique. Once a face is registered with the face ID, the system will occasionally update its model by taking images out of the successful login photos.

The white paper also explained how this technique is going to work even if the users grow beard or try a new glasses. As the system will occasionally update itself with users’ successful login photos. The new data will always be stored in order to help the system grow its intelligence alongside users’ new look. Here are the extracts from the paper:

To improve unlock performance and keep pace with the natural changes of your face and look, Face ID augments its stored mathematical representation over time. Upon successful unlock, Face ID may use the newly calculated mathematical representation — if its quality is sufficient — for a finite number of additional unlocks before that data is discarded. Conversely, if Face ID fails to recognize you, but the match quality is higher than a certain threshold and you immediately follow the failure by entering your pass-code, Face ID takes another capture and augments its enrolled Face ID data with the newly calculated mathematical representation. This new Face ID data is discarded after a finite number of unlocks and if you stop matching against it. These augmentation processes allow Face ID to keep up with dramatic changes in your facial hair or makeup use, while minimizing false acceptance.

As stated earlier in the write-up, one of the biggest concerns with Apple’s face ID is, user’s phone could be unlocked against their wishes. However, the giant has offered some of the explanations on the same but not satisfying enough to accept. The good news is, face ID recognition can be disabled with a pinch on the side phone buttons in order to shut down the phone. Unlocking the phone will require the pass-code to on the device.

Interestingly face ID is designed to work with Apple Pay paving an easy way for the users to complete a transaction without typing the keywords. However, Apple Pay requires users to double-click the sleep button in order to “confirm intent” by holding the phone for the payment terminal. It is a smart move by the giant but may be used against making a safe transaction. There are a number of such unanswered questions that Apple needs to work on for making its facial ID immune to any attack.