Eye On Cyber: What's The Deal With Facial Recognition Technology?

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – Forget about the fingerprint, more and more people are now using their face to unlock their phones.

So how does it work and is it risky? CBS2's Siobhan Gorman explains in this week's Eye on Cyber.

Facial recognition is a type of biometric that verifies your identity and it's designed to be a more secure way of using your phone.

It's available on Apple, as well as Android phones, and identifies you by taking multiple measurements of your facial features to establish a pattern unique to you.

In the case of the iPhone X, its face ID technology uses more than 30,000 invisible dots to create a 3-D map of your face in addition to capturing an infrared image.

In addition to unlocking your phone, face ID allows you to make purchases. The technology has also been used for airport security; in healthcare as a way to track medication use; in marketing as a way to make advertising more targeted; even as a way to spot your kids in summer camp photos.

For those reasons, some privacy advocates have been wary of the growth of facial recognition technology. They say there aren't enough protections to ensure your facial data is not misused.

If you decide to use it, here's what you should know about the iPhone X: Set up a passcode as a backup security measure. You may need it if you've just turned on your device of haven't used face ID for 48 hours, the device has received a remote lock command or there are five unsuccessful attempts to log in.

Facial recognition is the way of the future. Some analysts believe more than half of all phones will use 3-D technology by 2020.