US Government Confronts Apple On Face ID Mishap

If Apple thought that the facial recognition failure mishap at the launch event would clear up just by giving a clarification statement, well this is far from over. US government is now involved confronting Apple on the security of iPhone X.

A letter has been written to Apple CEO Tim Cook by US Senator Al Franken stating that “substantial questions remain about how Face ID will impact iPhone users’ privacy and security, and whether the technology will perform equally well on different groups of people. To offer clarity to the millions of Americans who use your products, I ask that you provide more information on how the company has processed these issues internally, as well as any additional steps that it intends to take to protect its users.”

Ten questions have been asked in the letter from Apple including how Faced ID feature was developed, where would the data go stored from Face ID, what will be done the data gathered, how Apple got 1 billion images data to train its machine and what will be the reaction of Apple if law enforcement agencies demand access to Face ID data.

Interesting: Apple explains reason behind failure of Face ID feature

These are the main questions asked by the Senator and he had also asked for a response before October 13th to all the queries.

In the launch event of iPhone X when Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi tried to give demo of Face ID, it failed. The clarification statement on its failure came by Apple stating “People were handling the device for stage demo ahead of time and didn’t realize Face ID was trying to authenticate their face. After failing a number of times, because they weren’t Craig, the iPhone did what it was designed to do, which was to require his passcode. In other words, Face ID worked as it was designed to.”