Face ID has upsides and downsides on both security and usability and isn't less secure than a PIN or Touch ID in practice
I was wondering recently after poring through yet another data breach how many people actually use multi-step verification. I mean here we have a construct …
Context & Ripple Effects
Troy Hunt's assessment lands four days after Gizmodo detailed how Face ID actually works — the front camera, infrared sensor, flood illuminator and dot projector stack that models a face and requires the user's gaze before unlocking or paying. That hardware detail matters for his argument: the question isn't whether a face is a better secret than a PIN, but whether the sensing pipeline enforces intent reliably enough to substitute for one.
Hunt frames the debate from the breach-analysis side of his work, where weak authentication is the recurring failure point. The related coverage gives him two reference points: MacRumors' finding that Face ID unlocks more slowly than Touch ID but wins in day-to-day usage, and the broader pattern of accounts protected only by reusable secrets.
First-order effects
- iPhone X buyers choosing between Face ID, Touch ID and a PIN get a practitioner's verdict: biometric unlock is not a downgrade in practice, so the usability cost of slower discrete unlocks is offset by faster everyday flows.
- App developers gain a new authenticator to integrate — the sensor coverage notes Face ID can be used inside apps, extending biometric gating beyond the lock screen.
Second-order effects
- Where biometric unlock replaces reused passwords at the device layer, attacks like the credential-stuffing exposure VICE found in Ring's device testing lose their easiest entry point, raising the bar for attackers to target the biometric pipeline itself.
- Rival phone makers face pressure to match both the sensor hardware and the gaze-detection intent check, since Hunt's argument makes 'just a camera' face unlock harder to defend as equivalent.
Third-order effects
- Hunt's practical-equivalence argument is the groundwork for what came later: Apple's passkeys demo joining Microsoft and Google in advocating passwordless authentication treats Face ID and Touch ID as the trust anchor for entire accounts, not just screen locks.
- If biometrics become the default local factor, the industry's weakest link shifts from user-chosen secrets to sensor spoofing and fallback mechanisms — making the rigor of the sensing pipeline, not password policy, the regulatory and security-audit battleground.
The trend: Authentication is migrating from shared secrets like PINs and passwords toward biometric-gated identity, with device sensors becoming the trust boundary for both unlocking and account access.