Apple's FaceID Could Be a Powerful Tool for Mass Spying

This Tuesday Apple unveiled a new line of phones to much fanfare, but one feature immediately fell under scrutiny: FaceID, a tool that would use facial recognition to identify individuals and unlock their phones. Jake Laperruque (@jakelaperruque) is senior counsel for privacy and security issues at The Constitution Project. He previously served as a fellow for New America's Open Technology Institute and The Center for Democracy and Technology. Unsurprisingly, this raised major anxiety about consumer privacy given its profound ramifications: Retailers already crave facial recognition to monitor consumers, and without legally binding terms, Apple could use FaceID to track consumer patterns at its stores, or develop and sell data to others. It's also possible that police would be able to more easily unlock phones without consent by simply holding an individual's phone up to his or her face. But FaceID should create fear about another form of government surveillance: mass scans to identify individuals based on face profiles.