What's in a Face ID?

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. At Apple's near-sacred product unveiling event last year, the iPhone X was undoubtedly the star of the show. Among its most boasted about features? Rather than asking users to use their fingerprint on the now-nonexistent home button to unlock their phones, the iPhone X's Face ID uses its cameras to make 3-D scans of their faces, which then enable them to unlock their phones by just holding the device up to their mugs. At the event, an exec boasted that the facial recognition technology proved far safer than its previous fingerprint-based Touch ID, claiming that there's only a 1 in a million chance of a random stranger's face unlocking a user's device.