Why Face ID Is Much More Secure Than Android’s Face Unlock
Unlocking your phone using your face is the new hotness, mostly thanks to Apple’s Face ID. Android has had a similar feature since 2015 called Trusted Face, but it’s not even close to the same thing.
How Does Face ID Work?
Apple put a lot of tech into getting Face ID to work in a way that was not only intuitive and accurate but also incredibly secure. In short, it creates a 3D map of your face by using a combination of infrared light and image capture. Forbes did a great job of explaining this:
It uses infrared (IR) light to illuminate your face while capturing the images, to work day or night, outside or indoors. IR spans wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation (known commonly as ‘light’) just beyond the visible spectrum, so iPhone X’s display won’t dazzle you in the dark.
In more layman’s terms, it uses a variety of sensors combined with the device’s camera to create a 3D map of what you really look like—that’s why it works in the dark or light, with a hat on, with or without glasses, and everything in between. All that tech is the reason the iPhone X series has a notch—that’s where the hardware sits.
In other words, it uses so much more than just a picture.
RELATED: How Secure Are Face ID and Touch ID?
How Does Trusted Face Work?
By contrast, Android’s Trusted Face feature (formerly called Face Unlock) is nothing more than a stored picture of your face. In fact, you can fool it pretty easily with a printed picture. That’s bad.