
Face ID Stinks [video] - pgl
https://www.troyhunt.com/face-id-stinks/
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lukeholder
Disagree with a lot of his thoughts.

I live in Perth Western Australia, arguably more sun than the Gold Coast. Wear
fully polarised sunglasses also, and it unlocks flawlessly outside.

Most of his attempts in the sun worked.

Also, he notes

> Oh - incidentally, I'm conscious that the final attempt I made in the car
> which failed is likely due to too many biometric fails and it wouldn't have
> passed under even ideal scenarios. That doesn't change all the failed
> attempts leading up to that, but it deserved a mention anyway.

Also mentions needing to look at the 'thing' to unlock. He could turn off the
attention unlock feature to get unlock scanning without needing to look at the
iPhone.

Lastly, he keeps swiping up from the middle of the phone which only brings up
notifications, to get into the home screen you need to swipe from the bottom.

~~~
staticelf
And people who live in colder areas where there are snow and have gloves are
really glad about the face id because then you dont need to take off your
gloves if you need to call someone.

~~~
icebraining
Gloves that work with touchscreens have been around for years.

~~~
jeremejevs
With a fingerprint passthrough? :)

~~~
fma
Probably meant you could enter a pass code without taking your gloves off.

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gigatexal
Been using my iPhone X for about 3 weeks now and 99% of the time faceID is so
seemlwas I can’t believe it. The other 1% is me getting used to it. So I
disagree. It’s fantastic. It does not surprise me though how clingy to old
ways some people are: how they abhor change. This is apparently the future of
Apple devices so we get onboard and adapt or find a platform without it - like
an iPhone 8.

~~~
gigatexal
*seemless. Sorry for the typo

~~~
pwinnski
seamless* but I knew what you meant. :)

~~~
gigatexal
spelling was never my forte. thanks!

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eknkc
Didn't watch the video so I have no idea what kind of issues the OP faces.

Wanted to explain my experience;

\- I trained face id with glasses. It recognizes me 100% with glasses in any
light condition.

\- Without glasses, it has something like 75% success rate but I feel like
it's getting better. Is it learning?

\- The thing is actually pretty fast, I just take my phone out and swipe up.
1/10 times I see the face id screen momentarily, otherwise it just goes
straight to home screen.

\- My only issue is when I want to check something in bed, maybe phone does
not look directly at my face etc. Then I need to enter the pin.

I would not say it stinks, again, I don't know the complaints in video. I
think it's better than Touch ID because that used to require multiple actions
to see notification details from lock screen etc. Face ID solves that problem.

Oh just one thing; my wife put her phone in front of my face the other day
saying "look at this!" all excited. Thought I was looking at a video or
something but it was locked. Turns out it was my phone, she just had it
unlocked and went away with the phone. So, there's that.

~~~
kbar13
not being able to unlock the phone while in bed using faceid is very
inconvenient. not only does faceid not succeed most of the time but i also
have to wait until the attempt times out to enter in my passphrase. overall i
think faceid > touchid but in some situations (like the bed scenario) i'd like
touchid to be available. when i got my iphone 5 i was super happy to see that
i could reach over to my bedside table and the phone would be unlocked before
i got it in front of my face.

~~~
ErikHuisman
If faceId fails i just press the home button twice and try faceId a second
time. Never failed me.

~~~
kbar13
what home button

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RandallBrown
Face ID has been much better for me than Touch ID was. If I was sweaty, had
just washed my hands, eaten greasy food, or my hands weren't perfectly dry
then Touch ID would fail.

When I got my iPhone X I had a big huge beard. I shaved it off and I was
expecting to have to retrain Face ID. Nope, it just worked immediately. It
fails sometimes, but not nearly as often as Touch ID did.

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stephengillie
Blog snippet links to a 26 minute Youtube video, where Troy describes (in a
rambling, conversational way) the difficulties he's experienced in unlocking
his phone with Face ID.

~~~
ulfw
I am surprised you made it through a 26 min video with nothing but predictable
content. Kudos to you. I didn't.

~~~
stephengillie
1.5x speed, frequent jumps forward by a minute or 3. This style of video has
become more common on Youtube, and I fear it's a trend to increase duration
and thus increase revenue, at the cost of "content density".

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blakesterz
tl;dr It just doesn't work all that well in many common situations.

Glare from sun off sunglasses makes it fail. The phone needs to be pointed
right at you, no opening it just pushing the home button. Can't be sitting
flat on the desk. There are many times when you don't want to pick it up and
point it at your face. Faceid makes you loses the tacticle feeling, no
information feedback to you. Unlocks too often, like you just want to see what
time it is. Pushing a button is an explicit action, you are telling it to
unlock now. If you have the phone in a car dashboard mount, it's tough to
unlock, you need to move. It needs to in general be pointed right at your face
to work. He's not sure if he'd buy another phone with faceid, though admits
the next generation should be better. At the moment it has too many problems.

"Require Attention" solves some of these issues, but then that weakens the
security.

He asks a question, is faceid for usability or security? Did Apple design it
to make things more usable or more secure? Is it there because it's better, or
just because they removed the home button?

~~~
zimpenfish
> Can't be sitting flat on the desk.

Just tested this and it works fine. I tap the screen, move my face vaguely
into the camera's view, and it unlocks.

> Unlocks too often, like you just want to see what time it is.

If I tap the screen or "raise to wake", it unlocks, sure, but -nothing else
happens-. I still have the time and notifications right there. You have to
swipe up to get to the home screen.

> It needs to in general be pointed right at your face to work.

Not in my experience. It has to be able to see your face but that seems to be
a pretty wide FOV.

> Glare from sun off sunglasses makes it fail.

Haven't experienced this but it's winter in the UK and I've only had
sunglasses on a couple of times (although I'd argue that the low sun would
make it more likely to create glare for the phone...)

I'm not entirely sure this video is accurate.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Does a photo work?

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cihankoseoglu
Face ID works miraculously for me. I was very surprised. My 6S Plus's Touch
ID, for me, didn't work quite well. It worked 70% of the time and I had to
type my passcode the rest of the time. I think Face ID failed once in the last
five days, since I got the device. Again emphasis on the 'for me' part. I
don't know if this reflects the whole, but Face ID is significantly better
compared to Touch ID.

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Shivetya
with regards to face id / touch id, I would love to be able to set layers of
protection on my device. So that face/touch would only unlock higher level
portions of the device but still require a password to get to my data, my
email. A config screen similar to notification allowances but instead denotes
which level of security is required to access. Another example would be
securing my recent calls list.

~~~
chatmasta
Sounds like a use case for multiple user accounts. That would certainly be
nice. Even nicer would be the ability to globally blacklist permissions for
each account.

For example I’d love to have a separate account for all my banking apps, with
a separate passcode and a locked down set of APIs.

This will never happen though, because app sandboxing is good enough.

~~~
mathgeek
> Sounds like a use case for multiple user accounts.

I don't think that's the use case here. OP is asking for the ability to lock a
single user's sensitive data behind a second layer of security. I interpret
this as similar to "with a password I can see my bank account's history, but
when I attempt a transaction I'm prompted for 2FA."

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jdlyga
Face ID is fantastic. It works more reliably than Touch ID did for me.
Security wise, maybe not as secure. But more convenient? Absolutely.

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pwinnski
He was for FaceId in the abstract, but finds it doesn't work well in the
concrete. But you can trust him, because he loves Apple kit.

Additional anecdata note: I was against FaceId in the abstract, but find it
works incredibly well in the concrete. My early skepticism has disappeared
completely.

I mean, I'm not saying he doesn't have issues with sunglasses and pool water
reflection, but even trying to demonstrate the issue in a video it seemed to
work a lot more often than he expected. I mean, he seemed to be surprised when
it worked with "sunnies" and a hat repeatedly. I dunno.

I've definitely found FaceID to be much, much useful than TouchID was. I
suspect that will be true for most people.

P.S. I know this is a video demonstrating the issue, but I wonder how much of
his issue is caused by thinking of unlocking as a completely separate step. I
just pretend my phone has no lock, and tap and swipe as needed.

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JoeAltmaier
It must be mentioned, biometrics are not suitable as a password. They could
replace a username. But passwords must be changeable, not left out in plain
sight all the time, and relatively unguessable. Biometrics fail on all counts.

~~~
jarman
Biometrics also cannot be used to produce cryptographic keys, meaning that all
depend on that last conditional jump not being circumvented.

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Vitaly
Face ID is by far my favorite feature of my iPhone X. I was expecting the
camera to be the number one feature. Don’t get me wrong, camera is fantastic.
As good as I expected and then some. But Face ID just blew me away. I was
always having issues with Touch ID. Whenever I have sweaty hands, or sometimes
just randomly it would fail. Since iPhone X I almost never have to actually
enter the lock code. It just works. And in rare cases it fails it works on the
second try when I retry it “properly”, fixing the usually obvious reason it
failed, e.g. not facing it right etc.

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wazoox
I have a Oneplus 5T. Face recognition works fine most of the time, I use the
finger scanner only when in the car, or some other unusual setting. Best of
both worlds

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nicolashahn
Kind of funny anecdote: My ~30 year old female Filipino coworker's phone
unlocked when she pointed it at another ~50s male Filipino coworker's face.

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EADGBE
I don't live in a beautiful place like sunny Australia, but I do live with
sensitive eyes and wear sunglasses often. Probably 300 days a year (tongue-in-
cheek from quote in video). Also have the annoying habit of sneezing when it's
too bright, so I'll wear sunglasses into and out of buildings.

I was going to go for the iPhone X, but hearing that sunglasses often impede
the unlocking process, I suppose I'll have to stick with the fingerprint
scanner. Bummer, was very excited for this.

~~~
eeeeeeeeeeeee
For what it's worth, my experience has been nothing like what this guy
described. I live in Colorado, which is a fairly sunny place, and I've had no
issues. I've used Face ID with polarized (Oakley) sunglasses, with a beanie
on, with a baseball hat on, and it works flawlessly both inside and out (even
on the mountains in an open field on a 100% sunny day).

I had far more failures with Touch ID, mainly due to slightly sweaty fingers.
Or failures after washing hands. Failures if you have greasy hands. Not to
mention if you live in a cold area where you use gloves in the winter, Face ID
is dramatically better than Touch ID now.

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wiz21c
Is it all we have to worry about ?

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Doctor_Fegg
[video]

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mtgx
Face ID will become an increasingly bigger risk with every store you go into
starting to deploy advanced face recognition (and then those databases will be
breached by hackers).

Apple should put Touch ID on the back of the iPhone and call it a day. It
doesn't even have to "go back" on iPhone X, just do it for the next iPhone 9
or whatever it will be called. See if people actually prefer the fingerprint
reader on the back and no-silly-notch iPhone over iPhone X.

~~~
jmull
The stores would have to deploy special-purpose IR cameras to collect the kind
of data FaceID uses. And even with that data it’s unclear how it could be used
to present a false image to a phone. The hacker pulling this off would also
need physical access to your phone.

From a security perspective it would be a lot easier to collect a fingerprint
and use known methods to create a false fingerprint that a phone would
recognize.

So if you’re worried about this kind of thing, FaceID is preferable.

~~~
eeeeeeeeeeeee
Also, if they were able to figure out how to install that face map onto the
secure enclave on your phone, it would likely have to be turned off and back
on and then they would need to enter their passcode on boot before Face ID
would work.

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gehwartzen
This seems like apple fixed something that wasn't broken. The cynic in me
suspects that long term Face-ID it is less about security and more about
giving Apple/Advertisers insights into what we look at (specifically on a
page) and how we emotionally react to content, in order to sell us more stuff.

