Yesterday it was reported that the Samsung Galaxy S8’s facial unlock feature was tricked into unlocking using a photo. This highlights one of the problems of facial recognition tech at the moment where several years ago, Android’s own facial recognition system was similarly bypassed.Now according to a report, industry sources are claiming that Samsung had intended for the feature to be used for “fun”, as opposed to it being a serious security feature that would protect the phone from entry from unauthorized users. The source was quoted as saying, “The phones can be unlocked by the face of a sleeping person, or even just by a photo. For now, the facial recognition technology is only intended for fun. It should not be considered as a foolproof security measure.”
While we can’t confirm if this was indeed Samsung’s intention to make facial recognition a novel or “fun’ feature, during our briefing with Samsung, the company did mention that face unlock isn’t as secure compared to fingerprints or iris scanning. We should also point out that during the briefing, an attempt to trick the phone in unlocking using a photograph was not successful, so we’re not sure what triggered it in the previous post, but presumably it might have to do with the color, lighting, angle, and so on.
In any case like we said, the Galaxy S8 does come with other more secure security measures like iris and fingerprint scanning, so those are some alternatives if you agree that maybe facial unlocking systems aren’t quite there yet.
