iPhone X owners found out over the long weekend that they cannot use the new FaceID to authenticate purchases made by their family members.
While you can use Apple’s FaceID to authorise a purchase for yourself, you can’t do the same for your kids. Owners of iPhone X recently discovered the facial recognition on Apple’s latest flagship cannot be used for family purchases, where a family member asks you to buy apps or music on their behalf. Incidentally, TouchID was allowed to authenticate family purchases on iPhones before.
While it’s not big a loss, users could face the pain of having to type out their passwords every time their family members wanted to buy something new on the app store.
Apple has not responded to why it has kept FaceID from authenticating family purchases, but Ars Technica hazards a guess that it could be to prevent security issues. When Apple introduced FaceID on the iPhone X, it did mention the possibility of an evil-twin fooling the system. We have also seen instances across the world where a person with strong resemblance with the owner was able to unlock the iPhone X. Apple surely doesn’t want to risk someone’s child going on a shopping spree on the app store.
Despite the relative unimportance of this news, it’s clear how the move from one biometric system to another will have its own limitations, which could forces companies to re-evaluate policies that were put in place with the advent of the fingerprint scanner.
From what it looks like, FaceID still has a long way to go to become reliable enough for fluent use.
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