Facebook Messenger apps to get facial recognition lock

According to reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong, who regularly comes out with this kind of news, Facebook is working on adding facial recognition to the iOS and Android versions of Messenger. The data is not sent to Facebook, it says in the description.

Wong bases the statement on her own research into the code of Facebook’s app. The text mentions Face ID, which is an Apple feature, but the text is found in the code of the Android version of the app, which makes one expect the feature to come to both Android and iOS.

It is also expected that Facebook will use the system implementations of biometric authentication for Messenger. If that is the case, then Facebook can indeed not access the data processed by the OS in a facial recognition: neither iOS nor Android give that away to apps that use the biometrics tech.

A screenshot shows that there is the option to lock Messenger after each exit, or a minute, fifteen minutes or hour after that. This is to protect personal conversations against viewing by third parties.