Apple Face ID fails to recognize identical twins

Apple introduced a new feature with iPhone X, called Face ID. The company aims to replace Touch ID with Face ID and is confident that their new Face ID is more accurate and more secure. According to Apple, Touch ID has a 1-in-50,000 false acceptance rate and Face ID has 1 in a million false acceptance rate. False acceptance rate means that it will identify someone else as you.

According to a new experiment by Mashable, Face ID fails to identify between identical twins. Mashable performed the experiment at their office where they had 2 sets of identical twins in their staff. They registered the Face ID with one of the twins and tried to unlock the phone with the face of the other twin and surprisingly, the phone unlocked. The experiment was repeated with the other set of twins and the result was again the same.

They then tried to perform the same experiment with glasses removed and Face ID again failed to differentiate between them. So apparently, Face ID is not perfect and it can be fooled by identical twins. However, you can not fool Face ID with digital or physical photos.

Previously, Mashable also performed the same test with Windows Hello Facial recognition technology. Windows Hello is used to unlock Windows 10 devices with supported hardware. And identical twins were unable to fool the Microsoft technology. So apparently, Windows Hello is better than Apple Face ID at this point. However, things might change in future as Apple keeps pushing updates to improve its technology.

There is another thing to keep in mind that this is just a case and it is not true for all identical twins. Face ID might differentiate between some identical twins and might fail only in a small number of cases.