Face ID is the iPhone X’s new touted security feature which is said to be more secure than fingerprints and harder to fool. In fact Apple made a pretty big deal about it by claiming to have worked with makeup artists, mask makers, and others to ensure that all the ways that one could trick Face ID would be covered.
However it seems that a recent video is making its rounds on the internet showing how a pair of siblings, who aren’t identical twins, manage to successfully “trick” Face ID into unlocking the iPhone X. Now while this does sound controversial, Rene Ritchie over at iMore points out that this isn’t actually a flaw of Face ID. In fact it seems to be a feature of Face ID and its neural networks that are designed to adapt to changes to your face as you get older, grow a beard, wear a hat, get fatter/thinner, and so on.
In a white paper Apple released on Face ID back in September, it mentions, “If Face ID fails to recognize you, but the match quality is higher than a certain threshold and you immediately follow the failure by entering your passcode, Face ID takes another capture and augments its enrolled Face ID data with the newly calculated mathematical representation.”
That is pretty much what the siblings were doing, where the one attempting to bypass Face ID kept re-entering the passcode whenever it failed, prompting Face ID to register his face as an authorized user. So like we said, this isn’t so much a flaw of Face ID but part of its learning feature. If someone already had your passcode, any protection fingerprint or facial recognition would already be moot, so it’s something to take into consideration before jumping to any conclusions about the success or failures of the iPhone X or Face ID. The original video can be found embedded on the Reddit thread, while the follow-up video can be seen above.