Face unlock liveness check? Great job Google

Nothing kills times while waiting for a 2TB data transfer like playing with a device. Since I haven’t played with my android device in a while, it was time to show it some love.

Ah, face unlock, how about that? I get to cure the “watching paint dry,” and look at myself all in one shoot! While making clown faces and setting it up, I was reminded of the geek backlash behind the feature.

The geeks figured out how to unlock the face unlock by essentially fooling it with a picture of the supposed person. This install raised eye brows and tossed this feature into the gimmick category.

But wait, here comes Google! A simple yet genius fix, and a silly name to go along with it. Liveness check! All this option does is require the person to blink, and because pictures can’t blink, face unlock is back in business! Very nice Google, very nice!