Facial Recognition Is Only the Beginning: Here’s What to Expect Next in Biometrics on Your Phone

Apple has a penchant for adding future-facing

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features to the iPhone a little later than other phone makers, but it markets them so slickly that they seem like shiny must-haves if you don’t already have them. Facial-recognition technology has been around for years, and is available in some phones, like Samsung’s Galaxy S8. What’s out there typically hasn’t worked well, though—for one thing, it’s been shown to be easily spoofed with something as simple as a photo of the phone owner’s face.

Apple says its version of the technology, called Face ID and available when the phone ships in November, uses a suite of sensors to map your face in 3-D. An infrared light illuminates your face, and a projector projects an array of infrared dots at it. An IR camera snaps an image of these dots, which the phone uses to authenticate you against an already-stored image of your face. The company claims its Face ID feature is so secure that there’s a one in a million chance that someone could spoof you—not only does it require a measure of the user’s attention to unlock the phone, but Apple also says it trained the feature on realistic-looking 3-D masks so it would not be tricked by them.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608879/facial-recognition-is-only-the-beginning-heres-what-to-expect-next-in-biometrics-on-your/