With the new type of iPhone that recently came out, everyone seems to be loving the iPhone X. Lots of my friends bought it because it has the most advanced technology: facial recognition.

A facial recognition system is a computer application capable of identifying or verifying a person from a digital image or video from a video source. One of the ways to do this is by comparing selected facial features from the image and database. It is typically used in security systems and can be compared to other biometrics such as fingerprint or iris recognition systems. Recently, it has also become popular as a commercial identification and marketing tool and replaced the old generation of iPhones which used fingerprints to log in.

Hackers will already be looking to replicate faces in order to trick the facial recognition systems, but the technology has proved harder to hack than fingerprint or voice recognition technology in the past.

Facial recognition software is based on the ability to recognize a face and then measure the various features of the face. Every face has numerous, distinguishable landmarks, the different peaks and valleys that make up facial features. FaceIt defines these landmarks as nodal points. Each human face has approximately 80 nodal points.

These nodal points are measured by creating a numerical code, called a faceprint, representing the face in the database. I heard of someone trying to fool their iPhone by using photos of themselves. Some people even try hundreds of different masks of different people to fool their phone, to no avail. It drives another question: Is face recognition unbeatable?

There was news that a Chinese woman was offered two refunds from Apple for her new iPhone X, as the AI-powered facial recognition technology was unable to tell her and her other Chinese colleague apart. She told local news that despite personally activating and configuring the facial recognition software, her female work colleague was able to get into both devices on every single attempt. She phoned the Apple support helpline when she discovered the design flaw but she claimed the staff did not believe her. She then went with her colleague to the nearest Apple store and demonstrated the issue to the staff.

Thinking that a faulty camera was to blame, the store operator gave her a refund, which she used to purchase another iPhone X. But the new phone turned out to have the same problem, prompting the store worker to offer her another refund and suggesting to her that it was probably not an issue with the camera but with the software itself. It is unclear whether she purchased a third phone.

<Leo Liu El Dorado Emerson 11th Grade>