The Newest Password Technology Is Making Your Phone Easier for Police to Search
In August, 28-year-old Grant Michalski was implicated as part of a ring of men sharing images and videos of a young girl, the daughter of one of the ring’s members, being sexually abused. The FBI arrived at Michalski’s home with the authority to require him to unlock his iPhone X using the phone’s Face ID feature. It was the first search warrant of its kind.
The implications are huge. From schools to to to, of course,, at baseball games, and . Apple also recently filed patents for “secure access to an electronic device using continuous facial biometrics”—in other words, technology that could continually scan as it’s being used, locking itself again when held by someone it fails to recognize. IBM, Microsoft, and Intel have all filed patents for some form of continuous authentication. Meanwhile, a small but growing of behavioral biometrics start-ups purport to be able to use unconscious behaviors—the way users scroll and tap on their devices, the angle at which they hold their phones—to verify identity. Theoretically, you could gain access to someone’s devices by stealing their PIN, but the phone would notice a discrepancy in these unconscious behaviors and lock again. Banks are especially interested in using this technology to detect fraud.
