The most obvious difference between the upcoming iPhone X and every iOS device that preceded it is the loss of the iconic Home button. For years, it has served as the fingerprint sensor for Apple's Touch ID technology, offering easy and secure unlocking of the device as well as authentication for transactions.
With the iPhone X, which arrives on Nov. 3, Apple has replaced Touch ID with Face ID as a secure biometric solution that uses facial recognition instead of a fingerprint.
Like Touch ID and a number of other biometric options, Face ID is essentially a shortcut to a device passcode rather than a replacement. It serves to make a device more secure by removing the primary drawback to a complex passcode – the time and effort it takes to enter such a code. In short, face ID offers convenience rather than an added layer of authentication.
Apple is hardly the only company to use facial recognition or fingerprints like this or as part of a multifactor authentication scheme. Microsoft did the same with its Hello feature in Windows 10, for example. What Face ID does offer, much as Touch ID did initially, is brand recognition and ubiquity of media presence. Making Face ID easy, quick, and a starring feature in the biggest revision to the iPhone ever has a way of making the world sit up and take notice of the potential of face recognition as a security tool – particularly for people not in the data/device security fields.
All of this could lead to the assumption that Face ID, while a novel way for Apple to achieve a bezel-less iPhone, is not a particularly significant advance in its own right. But Face ID portends noteworthy changes in how we perceive and use technology in much the same way that Siri or Alexa did when they emerged.
Voice assistants, particularly Alexa and its omnipresent nature in Amazon's Echo devices, made voice a core way to accomplish any number of daily interactions with media, Internet resources and connected devices. Pausing or playing music, turning on smart lights, or answering questions – even ordering households items – became as simple as speaking a request without needing to get up or even pause doing other tasks.
While Face ID isn’t aimed at such a seemingly endless array of tasks, it does have implications for two of the most important: identification and authentication.
Identification vs. Authentication vs. Authorization
Although we often think of logging into a device, PC, website or service as a single action, there are really three key processes:
- Identification: Providing an identity to be verified – typically a username.
- Authentication: Checking that identity against one or more factors such as a password, secret question, location, biometric data, or access to a specific device – to verify the identity.
- Authorization: Determining that the verified identity is allowed access before granting or denying it.
Despite these three distinct, albeit interrelated, actions, we typically combine them into one mentally. This is especially true of identification and authentication, which we often refer to as login despite there being two types of data being entered, the identity and the authenticating item(s).
Facial Recognition has never been just about authentication
Apple may be turning our unique features into the basis of Face ID's biometric backbone but there is a far more common use for the technology, one that Apple has built into products for quite some time: identifying faces. Apple first introduced facial recognition in iPhoto, the precursor to today's Photos app for macOS, and more recently, in the Photos app in iOS. The intended purpose: make it easy for users to identify and tag people in their photo libraries, an approach used by other companies and law enforcement agencies.
Put the combination of these two uses together and both identification and authentication can essentially be done in one combined step. There's no need to type or select an identity; the device simply identifies the individual by camera and authenticates using the same facial data. Since the cameras in almost all devices (including PCs and Macs) are above the screen, there is no user input needed at all – just hold up a device (or sit down in front of one) and login occurs as though there is no login.
Add in remote user profiles and authorized access to personal files (either local or in the cloud) and every device becomes personal with no action needed, be it a personal device like a phone, a shared device like a tablet or home PC or a corporate workstation.
The process, seamless and invisible, eliminates any real awareness of identity or a login.
Perpetuate this concept across an entire ecosystem – in the way Apple demonstrated with its AirPods' ability to be used across all a user's devices without setting up each one – and it becomes possible for users, families, even companies to do away with multiple login experiences. Everything, including even the front door, simply works as it should, accounting for each person’s access rights and tailored to respond based on those rights. It’s something that comes straight out of science fiction – think of how the U.S.S. Enterprise can react according to individuals without identification or how ads change in stores as people shop in Minority Report.
Is Apple planning for more than just bezel-free iOS devices?
It's easy to see Apple bringing Face ID to its entire product line and implementing it on multi-user Macs in just this way. iOS, however, has always been a single-user platform without unique user accounts or the option for separate user profiles…with one exception: the classroom.
In early 2016, Apple unveiled a Classroom app for the iPad that, for the first time, enabled a shared iPad feature. Designed for schools where it wasn't feasible to provide a single iPad for every student, shared iPad did the next best thing. It creates cloud-based profiles that iPads can access, allowing each student to select his or her profile, enter a passcode and have a unique experience as well as access to personal documents.
Apple has thus far described the feature as an education-only solution, one integrated into its overall K-12 package. As I've argued since the ability was unveiled, this could be a way for Apple to kick the tires and test the technology before extending it to consumers or business. In either case, it would be a natural fit with Face ID. In fact, for very young students, the combination would make implementing shared iPad much simpler.
If Apple does choose to expand iOS to support multiple users, a move that could align iOS and macOS more closely, Face ID would be a logical way to support identification and authentication in an interface/experience similar to a single-user device.
For now, Face ID points to a future where access to technology…just works. It’s the Apple way.