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Comment by quickthrower2 | Hacker News Reader

That is a good reason not to use face recognition.

On iPhone X, you can hold the power button and volume up for 5 seconds and it will lock the phone, disable Face ID, and force entering your passcode to unlock.

You can also tap the power button five times in a row, which brings up the emergency screen (Power Off, Medical ID, SOS call), but also disables face recognition until a pin unlock has happened.

Note this initiates an alarm and emergency call, with a three second window in which to cancel. Quite a surprise!!

I wish there was a control center toggle for this. I like to disable biometrics when I travel so a CC option would be great.

How does that work if you are under arrest? This is the scenario I am referring to and the article is about the police, so it's on point.

If you’re doing something illegal, I’d assume you wouldn’t use Face ID because of this exact scenario, but from what I’ve seen, most criminals are dumb.

>from what I’ve seen, most criminals are dumb

Nope, just the ones you see caught.

Innocent people get arrested. Innocent people spend years in jail awaiting trial. And occasionally innocent people get convicted.

The idea being that you are able to disable the biometric stuff before you expect to encounter a situation involving overreaching law enforcement. Hitting the power button 5 times in your pocket is easy enough.

Additionally TouchID is disabled after several hours of the device being unlocked. I presume FaceID is no different. So if you refuse to comply and they have to get a court order then the time limit may be reached.

You can even have the device wipe itself after 10 failed attempts to unlock it.

So you are fine with always type in a long password/numbers in public? And sure nobody looks at you/films your typing?

Its a tradeoff. It depends how defensive you want to be against law enforcement.

You could change the password on a regular basis as mitigation against prying eyes.

Except the law is most likely to be the ones watching you entering the password. So the tradeoff is about one attack vs another.

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