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Popular flagships fail the FACEID test (Topic)

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Popular flagships fail the FACEID test

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Information in smartphones can be of great importance to the user, so third-party access to it backfires. One of the ways to protect mobile devices is face recognition technology - one of the increasingly popular biometric unlocking methods. The phone "recognizes" the owner after he looks at the camera.

Foreign journalists of the information source Forbes organized an experiment to find out how reliable the face id technology is. Several popular smartphone models were selected for the test. Among them were the iPhone X and a number of Android devices: OnePlus 6, G7 ThinQ (manufactured by LG), representatives of Samsung - Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S9. All phones have a face unlock feature, but the way it works is different. On Android smartphones, the face-scanning system uses the front-facing camera, while on the iPhone X, recognition is carried out using 3D technology.

For the experiment, one of the journalists "provided" his head, on the basis of which a high-precision three-dimensional imitation was created on a 3D printer. To do this, the face was photographed with several dozen cameras, then separate images were combined and printed. Then the resulting 3D face was shown to all smartphones from the experimental list.

The first to lose ground was the OnePlus 6 model, which the first time managed to deceive with a fake head. Flagship devices LG and Samsung turned out to be more suspicious, but after changing the viewing angle and lighting, smartphones still gave up and took the artificial face for real. The most persistent was the face recognition technology of the Apple device, which defended its face id function and did not open access.

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Biometric technologies have different ways of implementation in different devices. For example, face id iphone uses an advanced method, where infrared illuminators, projectors of camera points are used to accurately record the biometric parameters of the owner. At the same time, the latest models of iPhones lack a fingerprint scanner, so they have no alternative to FaceID. At the same time, on many Android devices, facial identification takes place only with the help of a front camera. Although among them there are smartphones with a complex face-scan structure, for example, the flagships Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro and Huawei Mate 20 Pro.

Manufacturers OnePlus, Samsung and LG have spoken out in their defense, justifying the results of the experiment. The companies claim that FACEID is not a way to protect a smartphone, but only as a convenient way to open the interface.

On some models, the face scanner can be configured for better security, but the owner is identified much more slowly. Manufacturers are aware of the unreliability of facial technology, so they do not allow it to be used in financial transactions, for example, for purchases or confirmation of bank transactions. Although smartphones of the South Korean "Samsung" still have this opportunity, but only in parallel with biometric scanning of the iris.

The Topic of Article: Popular flagships fail the FACEID test.
Author: Jake Pinkman


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