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Comment by Aeolos | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft release Windows Hello (Passport) with Windows 10 on July 2015.[1] Apple copied it as "FaceID" into their smartphone devices on November 2017.[2]

A marketing innovation certainly, but calling this a usability innovation is quite a stretch.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10#System_security

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_ID

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That's not the same thing at all. Hello uses the webcam on your computer to try and recognize which user is signing in to the computer. FaceID uses a combination of camera, IR, and depth mapping to determine whether the user is a live person signing into the system and paying attention to the device. You could trick Windows Hello with a piece of paper with a picture printed on it.

This feature even existed on smartphones. I had a lumia 950 in 2015 and it used retina IR scanning to unlock. Worked pretty well, although the angle of detection was narrow.

Android had trusted face unlock since 2014

Worth noting is Apples face id is not just face recognition but depth scan for security.

Many devices dont have the depth scan making it all pretty unsecure when you can unlock with someones photo.

So Apples inmplementation is probably top.

Android actually did depth from movement for a while. Or at least many Android vendors.

Android’s face unlock was so terrible that they removed it afterwards.

From a security standpoint yes, but but the usability wasn't that bad.

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