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Comment by adrr | Hacker News Reader

Face unlock for Samsung phones provides no security unlike FaceId. So really Samsung just has a fingerprint scanner.

https://www.samsung.com/ph/support/mobile-devices/can-you-un...

The fact that it can be unlocked with a picture doesn't mean it has no security.

The main use case for phone locking is that you leave your phone in a cab, a bar or wherever else in public and someone picks it up later. That person isn't going to know who you are and have a picture of you. They're still prevented from being able to take the phone they just saw laying around and go through your emails, etc.

Never used a Samsung phone but touchId and faceid gates access to payments, passwords and banking apps. Typing a complex password on touch screen isn’t very fun.

Same on Android.

What a terribly not secure phone then.

Which one? Android is an operating system, not a phone. There are ones which are just as secure as an iPhone(Samsung with its Samsung Knox vault) and cheap phones which have only basic fingerprint readers(and even then I don't see what the problem is, the biometric data is stored in the storage managed by the reader chip, inaccessible to the rest of the device for every commercial fingerprint reader out there). I thought HN was all about having consumer choice?

The parent isn't saying that Samsung's face unlock isn't still useful. Just that "a picture of your face is the password" does pass the bar for security by any reasonable definition. It's a convenience feature. Apple's FaceID comes with real, and strong, guarantees about its effectiveness. Just the same as Samsung's fingerprint scanner.

On my S21 you can tick a "fast unlock" option for face unlock which comes with a warning that it can be fooled by a picture then. So I'm assuming that by default it can't?

From samsungs site "This will improve the recognition speed but also reduces security, increasing the possibility of a video or image being incorrectly recognized as your face."

So I assume both can be tricked but one is a little better.

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