Police warned not to look at iPhones, get Face ID blocked. Seriously.
For those of us who've lived and breathed Face ID on iPhone for a year already, or just gotten into it with iPhone XS or iPhone XS Max, this doesn't feel like new or canny information. For the mainstream, though, it's just beginning to enter the consciousness and the conversation.
From Motherboard:
Biometrics, it's important to remember, are best thought of as a username and a convenience, not a password or a security measure. They can and will be used against you, both under legal and, likely, extra-legal in-the-field situations.
That's why you can squeeze the two side buttons to temporarily disable Face ID, or turn it off and fall back on a passcode or strong password.
For more on locking down your iPhone, watch this:
And yeah, I get that this complicates lives for investigators. So does our society's refusal to fingerprint and DNA-database every baby born. I'll talk about it more in the future but it's becoming increasingly clear we need constitutional protection for our currently external but inevitably internal extended memory and computing devices.
But that's going to be a much longer conversation.
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Rene Ritchie is one of the most respected Apple analysts in the business, reaching a combined audience of over 40 million readers a month. His YouTube channel, Vector, has over 90 thousand subscribers and 14 million views and his podcasts, including Debug, have been downloaded over 20 million times. He also regularly co-hosts MacBreak Weekly for the TWiT network and co-hosted CES Live! and Talk Mobile. Based in Montreal, Rene is a former director of product marketing, web developer, and graphic designer. He's authored several books and appeared on numerous television and radio segments to discuss Apple and the technology industry. When not working, he likes to cook, grapple, and spend time with his friends and family.