Overheard a stranger at a coffee shop talking about facial recognition and it hit me different

I was grabbing a latte last week in Portland and this guy at the next table was ranting to his friend about how he disabled facial unlock on his phone after reading some report. At first I rolled my eyes, thinking oh great another privacy alarmist. But then he dropped a line that stuck with me: he said 'I don't want my face to be a password I can't change.' Something about that just clicked for me. I'd been using Face ID for years without thinking, treating my own mug like it was no big deal to hand over. But you can reset a stolen password in 5 minutes, you can't exactly get a new face. So I turned it off on my iPhone that same afternoon. Has anyone else hit a moment like that where one simple phrase just rewired your whole thinking on privacy?

2 comments

2 Comments

kai_brown238d ago

Does it count if the phrase came from a cybersecurity class I took a few years back? The instructor said something like 'biometrics are not secrets, they're identifiers' and that messed me up for a while. I mean, a password is something you know, a keycard is something you have. But your face? That's just who you are. You can't hide it from cameras in public, you can't change it easily, and if a database gets hacked, good luck asking for a refund on your identity. So yeah, I never set up Face ID after that. I just use a long passcode and try to be mindful of where my face is being scanned (which is harder than it sounds, honestly).

kim_martin8d ago

Wait, you mean you actually dropped Face ID completely after one class? That's wild to me. I mean, I get the logic behind it, your instructor had a point. But I've never met someone who just straight up refused to use it because of that. I set mine up day one and never thought twice about it.