Why You Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Use Face ID on iPhone

It may seem scary to hand over a facial scan to Apple, but this is not what you are actually doing. So, Why You Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Use Face ID on iPhone.

Big Brother! 1984! Terrible buzzword! Look, you are understandably skeptical of large-scale technologies, especially when their products require more and more personal data. But let’s focus on one specific problem today: Apple’s Face ID is absolutely, completely, and indisputably safe to use, and it will only make your iPhone more secure.

If you are used to a smartphone unlocked with a fingerprint or even a password, the thought of the device scanning your face can be unsettling. With all the discussions about facial recognition and smartphone tracking, you might think it’s a bit slippery for Apple to have something as important as your face.

The problem is that Apple is not Arya Stark, and the company will never be able to see this information in Face ID. Not only that, Face ID does not actually involve taking photos of your face at all. If you look at what your iPhone uses to make Face ID work, it will be an unrecognizable mathematical mess.

Why Face ID is so secure

When you set up Face ID for the first time, your iPhone will scan your face with 30,000 invisible dots from the original depth camera. As mentioned above, he does not take photos of his face; instead, it takes information from all these invisible points and turns it into a “mathematical representation”, that is, you, me, and Apple can’t just look at it. Understandable data.

Next, encrypt the data and store it in what Apple calls a “secure area.” That part is the key; Your encrypted Face ID information will never leave your iPhone. When you take a backup, it won’t be uploaded to iCloud or sent to any Apple server, it only exists on your iPhone and it will never go away.

And because it is encrypted, only your iPhone can interpret the data. No other device can read this “mathematical representation”, so it is useless for a company like Apple to obtain this data from the beginning.

How does Face ID work, then?

Well, if your iPhone doesn’t have a picture of your face, how does it know it’s you when you go to unlock the phone? This is where things get really cool. When you unlock the iPhone, the original depth camera will again project these 30,000 points onto your face and create another mathematical representation based on this data. Then compare the math string with the math representation saved on your device. If it matches, then you are there. If not, that is when the shaky lock icon appears.

The bottom line is: Apple can’t see your face, and neither can your iPhone. Apple can’t see your Face ID data; it’s stored securely on your iPhone and only you can access it. The same is true for any application that uses Face ID for authentication, such as when you are shopping on your iPhone. The app can only know if the facial scan matches, and cannot access any facial ID data during this process.

Here are some more encouraging statistics. If it comes from an iPhone with Touch ID, Face ID is 20 times more secure. Apple said that the odds that a stranger can fool Touch ID is one in 50,000. With Face ID, Apple claims this is one in a million. It is also based on depth information, which requires real human faces to achieve. 2D images (like photos) are unlikely to fool the sensor.

Face ID is secure and reliable, and with a good password, you can help ensure that no one but you or an authorized person can access your iPhone. So the next time your iPhone wants to scan your face, don’t hesitate to let it do so, and you’ll be relieved to know that neither your phone nor Apple is actually looking at you.