Why You Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Use Face ID on IPhone
Older brother! 1984 year! Terrible words! Listen, it’s understandable why you are skeptical about large technologies, especially when their products require more and more of your personal data. But let’s focus on one particular issue today: Apple’s Face ID is absolutely, completely, undeniably safe to use and only makes your iPhone more secure.
If you’re used to a smartphone that unlocks with a fingerprint or even just a password, the idea of this device scanning your face can be unnerving. With all the talk about face recognition and smartphone tracking, you might think that letting Apple have something as important as your face is a bit of a slippery slope.
The point is, Apple is not Arya Stark, and the company never sees this Face ID information. What’s more, Face ID doesn’t actually involve photographing your face at all. If you were to take a look at what your iPhone uses to make Face ID work, it would be an unrecognizable jumble of math.
Why Face ID is so secure
When you first set up Face ID, your iPhone emits 30,000 invisible dots from the TrueDepth camera to scan your face. As mentioned earlier, this does not take a photograph of your face; instead, it takes information from all these invisible points and transforms it into “mathematical representation”, data that neither you, me, nor Apple could understand just by looking at it.
This data is then encrypted and stored in what Apple calls “Secure Enclave” on your device. This part is key; your encrypted Face ID information never leaves your iPhone . It doesn’t upload to iCloud when you back up, it doesn’t go to any Apple servers, it just lives on your iPhone and never leaves.
And since it’s encrypted, only your iPhone can interpret the data. No other device can read this “mathematical representation”, so it would be useless for a company like Apple to take this data at all.
How then does Face ID work?
Okay, if your iPhone doesn’t have a photo of your face, how does it know that you are when you are about to unlock your phone? This is where things get cool. When you unlock your iPhone, the TrueDepth camera sends those 30,000 points back to your face and creates a different mathematical representation based on that data. It then compares this math string to the math representation stored on your device. If there is a match, then you are in the game. If not, then you will see a shaking lock icon.
The bottom line is this: Apple doesn’t see your face, and neither does your iPhone. Apple does not see your Face ID details; it is stored securely on your iPhone and only available to you. The same goes for any apps that use Face ID for authentication, such as when you buy something on your iPhone. This app is only allowed to know if the face scan was a match, and it cannot access any Face ID data in the process.
Here are some more encouraging statistics. If you’re using an iPhone with Touch ID, Face ID is 20 times more secure. Apple claims there is a 1 in 50,000 chance of a stranger cheating on Touch ID. Apple says Face ID is one in a million. It is also based on depth information, which requires a real face. 2D images, like photographs, are unlikely to be fooled by sensors.
Face ID is safe and secure, and when combined with a strong password, it can help ensure that no one else can access your iPhone except you or someone authorized. So, the next time your iPhone wants to scan your face, feel free to let it do so and take it easy knowing that neither your phone nor Apple is actually looking at you.