Face Recognition
The popular Apple features you won't be getting with the iPhone Duo
The biggest loss you'll feel when switching from a traditional iPhone to the Duo is the latter's lack of a FaceID array for facial recognition. If you've grown accustomed to FaceID, which pretty much always works as long as your face is somewhere in front of the screen, losing that option could be a major blow. When unlocking your phone, making purchases and logging into apps requires fiddling with a finicky fingerprint sensor every time, it can become aggravating. On the other hand, some users still miss the older iPhones with TouchID. Maybe your face doesn't play nice with FaceID for whatever reason.
Apple's iOS 27.0.1 update arrives with fixes for Face ID and touchscreen issues
The iOS 27.0.1 update began rolling out to users on Monday, and it mainly focuses on fixing bugs affecting the iPhone 18 Pro models. A number of reports from iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max owners suggested that the device would restart out of the blue after Face ID failed to authenticate. Some customers even had their devices replaced by Apple, but the problem persisted. The company later confirmed to 9to5Mac that it would release an update to address the issue. In addition to the Face ID bug, this update fixes another quirk that caused a color artifact in photos taken on the iPhone 18 Pro at the 2x zoom level.
Trial of live facial recognition in London stations leads to a false positive and no arrests
More than half a million faces were scanned in some of the capital's busiest transport hubs during the trial. More than half a million faces were scanned in some of the capital's busiest transport hubs during the trial. Tue 29 Sep 2026 05.48 EDTLast modified on Tue 29 Sep 2026 07.53 EDT A six-month trial of live facial recognition (LFR) technology in London's railway stations that cost more than £320,000 and almost 100 hours of police officers' time led to one false match against a watchlist of suspects and no arrests. More than half a million faces were scanned between February and July this year in some of the capital's busiest transport hubs during the British Transport Police (BTP) trial of the surveillance technology, which aimed to help catch offenders and people breaching court orders. A freedom of information document obtained by Liberty Investigates and shared with the Guardian shows that equipment hire and police staffing for the 18 deployments across the trial cost £320,786 and led to only one alert on a watchlist, which turned out to be an incorrect identification, also known as a false positive.
iOS 27.0.1 released: Apple fixes annoying iPhone 18 Pro restart and freezing issues
The first update to iOS 27 squashes a bug in which the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max would freeze or restart when you try to use Face ID. Lance Whitney is a technology journalist with an IT background. He's written for TechRepublic, PCMag, Macworld, and Time, among others, He also teaches classes in AI, cybersecurity, and social media. Apple has released its first update to iOS 27. The update fixes a bug that causes the 18 Pro and Pro Max to restart.
Revolut is piloting facial recognition at store checkouts in the UK
Revolut is trialing a new facial recognition system in the UK that could be convenient but controversial, the company announced. The company says its Pay with Smile system is the UK's first in-store facial recognition system and has no processing fees for merchants. It's only being offered at select Kiss the Hippo coffee locations in London, to start with. Pay with Smile will run on Revolut Register, the company's new hospitality point-of-sale (POS) hardware system. It's a two-screen system designed to combine payments, banking and floor operations for merchants.
Meta Sued Over Training Data for Its AI and Face-Recognition Systems
The proposed class action alleges Meta illegally harvested people's Facebook and Instagram photos to train its AI image-generation models and to build its unreleased "NameTag" face recognition feature. A set of parents and their children in Illinois and California filed a lawsuit last week in federal court in Chicago alleging that Meta illegally used their Facebook and Instagram photos to build NameTag, an unreleased face-recognition system for its smart glasses, and to train generative AI models including Emu and Muse Image . The proposed class action alleges that Meta violated Illinois and California privacy laws by extracting biometric information from people's photos without notice or consent. WIRED reported in June that code for NameTag had been secretly embedded in the Meta glasses AI companion app, which had been downloaded more than 50 million times. While the feature had not been enabled for users of the app, the analysis found that the system was designed to turn faces captured by the glasses into biometric signatures and compare them with so-called faceprints stored in a database on the user's phone.
Clearview AI Is Testing an AI Tool That Would Let Cops Unearth Your Life Online
InquiryIQ, a previously unreported prototype, tested a model from xAI, maker of Grok, to surface associates, social accounts, and other information about people identified through Clearview. In 2020, face-recognition firm Clearview AI became infamous for scraping more than 3 billion photos from the internet to turn faces into names for police and security professionals. Now the company is experimenting with trawling the web again, this time using AI to potentially help law enforcement fill in the person behind the name--who they are, who they know, where they live, and what they've left behind online. Clearview has quietly built and tested what it describes as an experimental AI "analyst assistant," WIRED has learned. Called InquiryIQ, the unreleased tool is designed to take details an investigator unearths from a Clearview search and then automatically fan out across the web--opening webpages, analyzing images, and assembling what it finds into a profile containing the possible employers, aliases, associates, and physical characteristics of a person police are investigating. InquiryIQ's interface states that supplying age, gender, and race can help the system make "smarter decisions" as it searches, according to code for the tool analyzed by WIRED.
Facial recognition technology coming into wider use in Japan
Services using facial recognition technology are expanding in Japan, allowing, for example, touchless or ticketless entry through train station gates and payments at shops without the need to take out a wallet or a credit card. Expectations are growing that the evolution of artificial intelligence will improve accuracy of facial recognition systems and help reduce fraud. Meanwhile, concerns about privacy violations persist, making thorough user information management essential. Trial Holdings, which runs discount stores and other operations, has introduced a payment service using NEC's facial recognition technology at 15 stores in Tokyo and Fukuoka Prefecture. Advance registration allows customers to shop simply by scanning goods at the self-checkout counter without using cash or smartphone payment services.
Did someone wearing Meta Glasses film you today? Are you sure?
'Here we have a leap in the erosion of our privacy rights through this slick technology that big tech promises will enrich our lives,' says Ryan Clarkson, one of the lawyers bringing a class-action suit against Meta over its privacy assurances. 'Here we have a leap in the erosion of our privacy rights through this slick technology that big tech promises will enrich our lives,' says Ryan Clarkson, one of the lawyers bringing a class-action suit against Meta over its privacy assurances. Did someone wearing Meta Glasses film you today? People say they've been secretly filmed in their own home, at concerts and at work. Are the wildly popular smartglasses the final nail in the coffin of personal privacy? The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. "I've had one person who told me that their intentions were creepy," a man tells me over a video call, on condition of anonymity.