Face Off: Why Critics Fear Face ID

- Gary Marshall

The iPhone X has a feature no other device has: Face ID. This is Apple’s replacement for Touch ID, and it uses facial recognition to identify you not just for unlocking your phone, but authorising Apple Pay, too. Apple clearly thinks it’s the future, but not everybody is so enthusiastic.

There are three key worries about Face ID. One, some people fear that it just won’t work as well as in Apple’s slick videos; two, that it will enable other people to unlock your phone without permission; and three, that it’s a potential privacy nightmare.

Let’s consider reliability first. As anybody who doesn’t have an American accent knows from using Siri, Apple’s innovations aren’t always as reliable in real life as they are in tech demos. And that’s a concern because Face ID isn’t just a cute feature for animating emoji: it’s the gateway to in-app purchasing and real-world shopping via Apple Pay, so if it doesn’t work it’ll embarrass us in public. That’s never a good look.

Some critics question how representative the billion images Apple scanned for Face ID actually are. Webcam firms have been caught out with this in the past – HP famously released cameras that couldn’t cope with dark skin – and in the run-up to the iPhone X’s on-sale date many people expressed concerns about whether Face ID might favour particular ethnicities over others. Some wondered where Apple got its billion photos from in the first place.