“Face ID is easily the most hot-button topic to come out of Apple’s iPhone event this week, notch be damned,” Matthew Panzarino reports for TechCrunch. “As people have parsed just how serious Apple is about it, questions have rightly begun to be raised about its effectiveness, security and creation. To get some answers, I hopped on the phone with Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi.”
“When it comes to customers — users — Apple gathers absolutely nothing itself. Federighi was very explicit on this point. ‘We do not gather customer data when you enroll in Face ID, it stays on your device, we do not send it to the cloud for training data,’ he notes,” Panzarino reports. “One of the primary questions about Face ID that has come from many quarters is how Apple is going to handle law enforcement requests for facial data. The simple answer, which is identical to the answer for Touch ID, by the way, is that Apple does not even have a way to give it to law enforcement. Apple never takes possession of the data, anonymized or otherwise. When you train the data it gets immediately stored in the Secure Enclave as a mathematical model that cannot be reverse-engineered back into a ‘model of a face.’ Any re-training also happens there. It’s on your device, in your Secure Enclave, period.”
I also quizzed Federighi about the exact way you “quick disabled” Face ID in tricky scenarios — like being stopped by police, or being asked by a thief to hand over your device,” Panzarino reports. “‘On older phones the sequence was to click 5 times [on the power button], but on newer phones like iPhone 8 and iPhone X, if you grip the side buttons on either side and hold them a little while — we’ll take you to the power down [screen]. But that also has the effect of disabling Face ID,’ says Federighi. ‘So, if you were in a case where the thief was asking to hand over your phone — you can just reach into your pocket, squeeze it, and it will disable Face ID. It will do the same thing on iPhone 8 to disable Touch ID.’ That squeeze can be of either volume button plus the power button.”
Tons more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Federighi also revealed that Apple will be releasing a security white paper on Face ID closer to the release of the iPhone X which will go even farther than even Panzarino’s very comprehensive report, answering just about anything that anybody outside of Apple needs to know about Face ID and its inherent security.
SEE ALSO:
Apple: Just squeeze the iPhone X if you’re forced into a Face ID unlock – September 15, 2017
Gripping buttons on both sides of iPhone X disables Face ID – September 14, 2017
Police: Apple’s new Face ID technology will make it harder for authorities to bypass enhanced security – September 13, 2017
U.S. Senate Democrat Al Franken wants Apple to provide more information on Face ID facial recognition technology – September 13, 2017