Santos 1
Ana Paula Silva Santos
English 102
Dr. Brookter
03/08/2018
Face ID better or worse?
Brian Feldman a writer for New York Magazine published an editorial on
September 12, 2017, regarding his opinion on Apple’s newest technology the Face ID
on iPhone X “Replacing Touch ID with Face ID is a Worse Idea Than You Think”. He
says that Touch ID was faster, more convenient and it worked with no fuss, and if you
get it wrong you just need to reposition your finger but with Face ID, without the
feedback it looks like a guessing game because you do not know if you raise the phone
up or change the angle, or open your eyes wider and this gives you more variables to
authenticate which means more points of failure. He also points out how Face ID is
going to be inconvenient in social interactions, like for example stopping a conversation
and losing the eye contact just to unlock your phone and how dangerous would be for
drivers. But is Brian Feldman seeing all the advantages Face ID can have or he is only
seeing and pointing it out the bad parts?
First, Brian Feldman points out how hard would be to get a solution in case your
face recognition keeps falling and yes with the Touch ID you could also put someone
else’s fingerprint which was a great thing if you were having problems like that and the
owner of the phone cannot do that with Face ID but Face ID can be bypassed using
passcodes, until the owner figures it out what is the problem with the face ID so they
will not be lock out of their phones.
Second, Face ID is a lot safer than Touch ID like Brian himself points out in his
text the chances of someone else unlocking your phone with Touch ID are one in
Santos 2
50,000, while with Face ID it’s one in a million. The set up for Face ID is really safe
and technological the phone has all this different thing that work together to take a 3D
picture of your face. The phone gets all this different dots on to your face and that marks
out the various contours of your visage, creating a detailed map. The camera records the
placement of every dot, sends the data to the Secure Enclave of iPhone X's A11 Bionic
processor chip then it is checked against the pre-scanned image to make sure that the
right face is being seen. If it is a match, the phone is unlocked, all that happens really
fast within a blink of an eye.
Last but not least, Brian tries to explain how the Face ID is going to make social
interactions harder, but honestly aren`t they bad already? our phones have been in the
middle of our social life for a long time now, we are losing our ability to have more
spontaneous or more deeper conversations, we see families all sitting together in their
leaving room and not exchanging a word because all of them are on their phones, our
cell phones are ruining our face to face communication skills and Face ID is not going
to change that or make it worse than already is.
Indeed, Brian Feldman only saw the negative side of Apple`s Face ID innovation.
However, I believe that he had good intentions putting out there that Face ID is not as
good as Touch ID and he strongly believes that and he was just trying to help other
people in their decision of changing to Face ID or not.
