U.S. Senator Raises Privacy Concerns About Apple’s Face ID

One impressive new aspect of Apple’s new iPhone X is Face ID, a form of biometric identification technology that scans your face to unlock your phone and confirm purchases. Face ID is a replacement for Touch ID, given that the new iPhone lacks a home button and fingerprint sensor.

Shortly after the new flagship smartphone was unveiled at Apple’s September keynote, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) penned a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook expressing concern about the technology’s privacy implications.

“While I am encouraged by the steps that Apple states it has taken to implement the system responsibly, the addition of this new technology to the iPhone has serious privacy implications,” Franken wrote in a Facebook post.

In the letter, Franken posed 10 questions to Cook, pressing him to explain how the iPhone’s new facial recognition tool will impact the privacy and security of consumers.

“Apple itself could use the data to benefit other sectors of its business, sell it to third parties for surveillance purposes, or receive law enforcement requests to access it facial recognition system — eventual uses that may not be contemplated by Apple customers,” Franken wrote.

Apple has stated, in response to security concerns, that all of its faceprint data is stored locally on an individual’s device and that third party applications will not have access to it. Franken asked Cook to explain more about the safeguards surrounding the faceprint data and whether Apple could provide assurance that it would never be shared to third parties for commercial purposes in the future.

He also asked Cook to explain how the company would respond to law enforcement requests for either faceprints or the Face ID technology. Last year, Apple was embroiled in a legal dispute with the FBI when it refused to help the government agency break into the iPhone of one the San Bernardino shooters. Citing security concerns, Cook said that his company would not “create a backdoor to the iPhone”. The FBI eventually paid a third party nearly a million dollars to unlock the phone.

Franken also asked for details about the Face ID technology, which Apple said was developed using more than one billion images. It’s unclear where those images came from and whether the system has been trained on a diverse set of faces in terms race, age, and gender to correct for bias.

Franken has requested a response to his questions by October 13.

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