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'Dear Apple, The iPhone X and Face ID Are Orwellian and Creepy' (hackernoon.com)
Trent Lapinski from Hacker Noon writes an informal letter to Apple, asking "who the hell actually asked for Face ID?" and calling the iPhone X and new face-scanning security measure "Orwellian" and "creepy": For the company that famously used 1984 in its advertising to usher in a new era of personal computing, it is pretty ironic that 30+ years later they would announce technology that has the potential to eliminate global privacy. I've been waiting 10-years since the first iPhone was announced for a full-screen device that is both smaller in my hand but has a larger display and higher capacity battery. However, I do not want these features at the cost of my privacy, and the privacy of those around me. While the ease of use and user experience of Face ID is apparent, I am not questioning that, the privacy concerns are paramount in today's world of consistent security breaches. Given what we know from Wikileaks Vault7 and the CIA / NSA capabilities to hijack any iPhone, including any sensor on the phone, the very thought of handing any government a facial ID system for them to hack into is a gift the world may never be able to return. Face ID will have lasting privacy implications from 2017 moving forward, and I'm pretty sure I am not alone in not wanting to participate.
The fact of the matter is the iPhone X does not need Face ID, Apple could have easily put a Touch ID sensor on the back of the phone for authentication (who doesn't place their finger on the back of their phone?). I mean imagine how cool it would be to put your finger on the Apple logo on the back of your iPhone for Touch ID? It would have been a highly marketable product feature that is equally as effective as Face ID without the escalating Orwellian privacy implications. [...] For Face ID to work, the iPhone X actively has to scan faces looking for its owner when locked. This means anyone within a several foot range of an iPhone X will get their face scanned by other people's phones and that's just creepy.
The fact of the matter is the iPhone X does not need Face ID, Apple could have easily put a Touch ID sensor on the back of the phone for authentication (who doesn't place their finger on the back of their phone?). I mean imagine how cool it would be to put your finger on the Apple logo on the back of your iPhone for Touch ID? It would have been a highly marketable product feature that is equally as effective as Face ID without the escalating Orwellian privacy implications. [...] For Face ID to work, the iPhone X actively has to scan faces looking for its owner when locked. This means anyone within a several foot range of an iPhone X will get their face scanned by other people's phones and that's just creepy.
Who asked for the original Macintosh or iPhone either? People often don't know what they've been missing out on until you show it to them. This person obviously doesn't understand Apple's history and the way they operate.
This article is so stupid. The author clearly has no idea how existing biometrics that Apple offers work. Touch ID stores information in a secure element, and nowhere else. No cloud, no device transfer methods, nothing - it is On Device only. Face ID is no different. In fact, it doesnâ(TM)t even store images of your face - it reduces your faceâ(TM)s geometry to a mathematical equation that is literally impossible to reverse engineer, due to the high levels of iOS hardware security. Read the damn iOS Security Guide, published and updated by Apple - it is FULL if information on how this stuff works, how keys are handled, how the Secure Enclave works, how encryption works across the OS and user data, itâ(TM)s a great read and would put these inane âoefearsâ to rest simply by understanding how it works. âoePeoples will always fear what they donâ(TM)t understandâ
A good enough mask or disguise can open your devices now.
I don't read AC
This guy is just making stuff up. First off, he has no idea if people around the phone owner also get scanned. Secondly, Apple doesn't take a picture of anyone, only a hash of a mathematical representation of the 3D scan of the facial contours created from the 3D projector. And finally, it doesn't send that (irreversible) hash anywhere - it stores it internally in the Secure Enclave, so it wouldn't even matter if they *where* scanning other faces.
Get a grip, man, I'm sure you can find other things to hate them for, you don't have to make stuff up!
Why didn't anyone hate on Samsung for *actually* taking pictures?
I've been thinking about the coming sensor wave for some time, and what I've concluded is this: give people something genuinely more convenient, and they will trade it for slightly more risk, every time. It won't even be close.
Why? Because people intuitively want to use ALL their senses to control their environment. It's something they've been doing their entire lives, and your typical computer interface really stinks by comparison. Heck, even something mundane like driving a car provides a hugely richer control experience than using any smartphone app you can name.
Computer-human interfaces suck. You can't fight progress in this area.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
It dosent work if you scrunch up your face, or close an eye, or not look at it. After two tries it rolls over to passcode, that's why the demo failed at launch (people messing with it in back).
It's also available for Microsoft Surface devices which just goes to show how much things have changed. Now it's no problem when MS does it but when Apple does it's "Orwellian and creepy".
Don't buy it.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Original comment: "it appears they won't yet be able to force you to facial unlock the phone"
Follow-up comment: "IANAL but my understanding is there is no legal precedent yet."
These claims are not remotely in agreement. In fact, they are opposites: If there is no legal precedent one way or the other, then of course police will take the presumed liberty to do whatever they want, and dare the courts to stop. And in many cases not even then. That's like, almost the entire history of policing in a nutshell.
Don't like face ID?
Use a passcode. Or no security at all...
OMG, this door thing is creepy. There's a window where someone can look at me but I can't look at them, and they need to actually let me in! I can't just walk into a cave anymore! WTF!
when October 31st rolls around and everyone who has an iPhone 10 and is wearing a mask discovers that they have to take off part of their costume just to make a phone call.
I'm guessing you don't work on anything more complicated than a horoscope generator, then. Clearly, the fallback in this case would be the passcode. Did you seriously not consider that? And because you didn't actually consider that possibility, did you seriously not consider that Apple engineers would consider it? Or were you just trying to score snark points?
Seriously, which is it? I want to know.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
I'll agree with the author with one single thing: it really isn't good that the face recognition tech is getting normalized and spread out as much, which is something that Apple tends to do through it's cult like fanbase and media love affair.
But let's be realistic for a moment here. First of all, public security cameras are already a thing, plus dashcams in some countries. And plenty of relatively good software for face recognition and identification are already out there, in real time and without any need for special cameras. In fact, we're already over face recognition and now encroaching on general recognition which is a full complexity step beyond it. Software that can use real time input of regular cameras to identify not only face, but also objects, animals, landscapes, even with some interpretation about the data. Not only that, the tech and code is already open source:
https://pjreddie.com/darknet/y...
For this particular application of surveillance technology, Apple isn't going to make much of a difference with a Face ID thing in their smartphones... we're already past Orwellian surveillance.
Second, iPhone X isn't even the first to do it. Samsung already had both face recognition and iris recognition in the failed Note S7, current S8, Note 8 and one Galaxy Tab. Not to mention how Microsoft came with Windows Hello years ago. So the timeframe for panicking has already passed if it's about personal devices with facial scanners.
The tech is already here, and no matter what one or another company does, it will be developed and used. Unfortunately, governments, policies and law hasn't quite catched up to the dangers of so much erosion of privacy, but we'll eventually have to get there, probably not without a very horrible round of feeling the consequences of living in a society that doesn't have almost any privacy protection anymore.
But like I said, it's too late to panic. In fact, it's the sort of short sightedness that lead us to this situation. If people are really feeling creeped out only now because Apple released some new phone with a whole bunch of old tech borrowed from past devices, then people are really trailing behind times.
Apple even sometimes tries to save face posing as a costumer friendly corporation that cares for stuff like privacy, but that's not where people should be looking at. It's governments, governmental agencies, the frequent overstepping of citizens rights, all the revelations that came from multiple whistleblower cases... you see, nothing is changing. There is no public outcry and outrage. The Snowden leaks would have to have ended in a complete revolution and overturning of political power to stop something like an Orwellian dystopia. It's too late now. It certainly won't be as obvious or as clear as in, say, the 1984 novel, but it's already happening, make no mistake.
You can have absolute certainty that DARPA is probably already funding multiple projects for robots and cameras with advanced facial and object recognition cameras to be potentially deployed in several scenarios in the future. You can bet that autonomous cars in the future will do double duty in identifying people and potential criminal scenarios. We already live in a suveillance state, and things are only going to get worse, particularly with governments that are all about bravado, show of strength, and activelly persecuting citizens inside of their own nation because of their skin color or previous nationality. Apple is but a drop in the ocean.
It recently leaked that - in the opening scene of Game Of Thrones Season 8, we'll see Arya Stark successfully unlock Littlefinger's iPhone X using his face.
#DeleteChrome
Exactly. Apple had face recognition in iphoto since several years, they could easily have adapted it quickly for use in a phone, but what they did required serious engineering. Saying that X had the feature earlier is naive. Comparing Apples to, well, Koreans.
I honestly don't get it. And I would really love to understand, I do.
What I can observe is that iPhones lose features that I would actually use and gain features that I can't really identify a sensible use for. In other words, to me they become inferior with every incarnation.
I can only assume that this is not the case in general, because the newer models of iPhones still sell in approximately the same number as the older models did when they came out. There has to be a reason for this. And please refrain from trolling like "because people are dumb", that's rarely the case. There are certainly cases of people who'd buy anything from brand X because ... reasons, but after 2-3 models of getting increasingly inferior products, they would stop doing it. So they actually must deem those products satisfactory.
And this is the part I don't get.
Do people really want these features? The unlock-by-fingerprint, unlock-by-face and the other recent additions that I'd call gimmicks at best and security risks at worst? While at the same time not missing the ability to attach headphones, replace the battery (or any part for that matter), use the software of their choice instead of what the vendor deems "appropriate" and so many other things where I simply cannot fathom why one would put up with it.
What the hell is the appeal of this thing? I got used to not fully understanding the motivation humans have, but why they actually consider newer models of iPhones superior to their (in my opinion) more versatile and useful older models completely puzzles me.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The Apple website (on several occasions) rejects my negative comments. Usually I'll be trying to describe my problem and the context, but at some point I apparently become too negative and the Apple website says it can't save the draft, and once that happens, whatever I've written cannot be posted. Doesn't seem possible to undo or reset the flag, whatever it is.
Has anyone else experienced this? If you are asking a question or making a comment in the Apple "Discussions", but your tone becomes too negative, then your comment suddenly becomes unpublishable? I suppose it could be based on human moderation, but I know that some of the sentiment analysis systems are becoming powerful enough to do it automatically without expensive and clumsy human beings in the loop.
Details of my most recent experience at https://slashdot.org/journal/2..., but this isn't the first time I've seen it. I think Apple has decided they need to control the tone of discussions or no one will pay $1,000 for their latest and greatest iPhone.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I think your "future" has already arrive on the Apple website. If you get too negative, then your comment will be blocked. I think it's based on automatic sentiment analysis, but there might be a personalized element there, based on my prior negative comments. Most of them involved annoying problems with the voice dictation. I posted a longer description elsewhere in this discussion, but your comment was the only one to mention censorship.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.