Face recognition for authentification has been around for a quite a while, let's see how robust Apple could make it. It's still a weird future we're heading towards.<p>It makes me wonder what legal consequences it's gonna have once this kind of technology is widespread among all smartphones with high identification reliability? What's to stop anybody from combining different biometric identification systems into one device? A combination of Touch ID/Face ID, coupled with some voice recognition and whatever else is possible with biometrics, would probably be able to identify the user with a very high certainty.<p>Smartphones are also increasingly being turned into an "ID card replacement", even banks have been pushing to use them as a replacement for CC/Debit cards for years.<p>Which kinda makes sense considering how not every country has ID cards but a vast number of people on this planet have smartphones or at least mobile phones.
If one wanted to index the whole human population of planet Earth, it would probably a good start to "just" collect the SIM/IMEI data from all mobile phones in circulation. [0]<p>It's still a quite dystopian idea of a future, where the identity of a person is solely defined and legitimized by their smartphone/mobile device. Scary thing being: We are closer to this kind of future than it might seem; the aptly named US program "Skynet" uses mobile metadata for targeting selection of drone strikes, has been doing so for quite a while [1]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.gsmaintelligence.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gsmaintelligence.com/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKYNET_(surveillance_program)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKYNET_(surveillance_program)</a>