Face ID Hacks: Video Shows 10-Year-Old Boy Fooling Mother's iPhone X

A new video shows a 10-year-old boy unlocking his mother’s iPhone X using the Face ID, proving the facial recognition technology on the device can be fooled regardless of the age gap.

The mother, Sana Sherwani, and the son, Ammar, realized the Face ID could be fooled shortly after purchasing the device, Attaullah Malik, the father of Ammar, said in a LinkedIn post.

“We were sitting down in our bedroom and were just done setting up the Face IDs, our 10-year-old son walked in anxious to get his hands on the new iPhone X,” Malik wrote. “Right away my wife declared that he was not going to access her phone. Acting exactly as a kid would do when asked to not do something, he picked up her phone and with just a glance got right in.”

The video of the 10-year-old unlocking the Face ID was uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday:

"It was funny at first," Malik told WIRED. "But it wasn't really funny afterward. My wife and I text all the time and there might be something we don’t want him to see. Now my wife has to delete her texts when there's something she doesn’t want Ammar to look at."

Apple said when it introduced the Face ID in September that the probability of someone unlocking another person’s device with the Face ID is approximately 1 in 1,000,000, but that number narrows among twins and siblings. In this case, it was not among siblings, and there was a large age gap.

“His face is smaller than my wife’s face and the geometry of their faces don’t match, at least to human eyes,” said Malik in the blog post. “Also, the additional neural network present in iPhone X that’s trained to spot and resist spoofing doesn’t work as intended in this scenario.”

The family says they don’t want to disable the Face ID, but that they are concerned about privacy. It’s also worth pointing out that the Face ID is one of the most important features on the $999 smartphone.

Other people have had their family members unlock their iPhone X with the Face ID. An iPhone X user posted videos on YouTube of his much-younger half-brother unlocking his device.

Earlier this month, two siblings who were not twins were also able to fool the Face ID. The owner of the iPhone demonstrates in a video how he unlocks the phone with the Face ID and then hands over the iPhone X to his brother. The sibling was not able to open the device using the Face ID during the first attempt, but did unlock it when he put on his glasses, which looked similar to the owner’s glasses. The sibling unlocked the iPhone X with the Face ID twice.