Wednesday 30 December 2020 Earlier this year I purchased an iPhone 12 Pro, a £1,000 smartphone that is, frankly, a device not fit for purpose in 2020. The iPhone 12, much like every Apple smartphone since 2017’s iPhone X, has just one method of biometric authentication: Face ID. However, as a result of the pandemic sweeping the globe, the majority of us are now wearing masks whenever we leave the house, which has been confounding our smartphones’ built-in facial recognition software. And, despite inbound vaccines, it will be some time before as a society we are mask-free, and even then there is no guarantee we will return to such a culture post Covid.