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A large portion of Apple Inc.’s customers spurn facial biometrics, a key security element in Apple’s new iPhone X, according to new research.
Survey results from United Kingdom-based Juniper Research say that more than 40% of users of Apple’s mobile devices in the U.S. consider themselves unlikely to use facial recognition as a payment-security technology. Instead, Juniper says contactless-payment users consider fingerprint sensors and voice recognition more appealing—with 74% saying they are likely to use fingerprint authentication and 62% voice recognition.
The iPhone X, which Apple announced last week and ships Nov. 3, will employ Apple’s new Face ID technology for user authentication, including authentication for purchases with Apple Pay, Apple’s contactless mobile-payment service.
Juniper’s findings come from surveys of 500 smart-phone users in the United States and 500 in the United Kingdom about their attitudes toward mobile banking and contactless payments. Some 46% of the Americans said they use contactless payments, but the overall number of contactless payers grew only 2% in the past year.
The probable reason for consumer aversion to facial biometrics is unfamiliarity with the technology.
“Consumers’ reluctance to consider facial recognition biometrics is because it’s a relatively new method of authentication,” report author James Moar tells Digital Transactions News by email. “Fingerprint scanning has been part of flagship smart-phone authentication for a while now, and financial institutions have been steadily introducing voice-recognition systems into both phone and online banking for a similar period of time.”
Apple’s existing iPhones use Touch ID, a fingerprint-based biometrics system, for Apple Pay authentication, as do the new iPhone 8 models, which Apple also announced Sept. 12. Many Android-based smart phones also use fingerprint biometrics.
An Apple spokesperson did not respond to a Digital Transactions News request for comment.
Security fears about facial biometrics play a role too, according to Moar. “There are also likely to be residual fears about the ability to fool a system—security of consumers’ biometrics is a concern for some users, and the proliferation of photo-sharing means that facial images are far easier to come across than fingerprint and voice records. This isn’t much of a security risk in reality, as there are sophisticated methods for liveness detection in facial-recognition systems, but these are less known to consumers than methods like fingerprint scanning.”
Apple says the facial-image data captured by Face ID are encrypted and designed to resist spoofing by photos or masks. Face ID activates an iPhone when the legitimate user looks at it, even in a darkened place. Face ID won’t work in some situations, such as if the user has her eyes closed. An Apple executive last week suggested that an identical twin of the proper user might be able to fool the system, but Apple claims there is a one in 1 million chance of randomly fooling Face ID versus a one in 50,000 chance with Touch ID.
