Apple Wants to Use Your Selfies . . . to Unlock Your Phone

At last, our selfies finally have a purpose! (Aside from Instagram "likes," of course.) If Apple's most recent trip to the US Patent Office has anything to say about the company's next big software move, we might be using selfies to unlock our iPhones sometime soon. According to a patent recently granted to Apple, new facial-recognition software will allow you to snap a photo of your face to unlock your iPhone instead of typing in a password or scanning a fingerprint.

Having a patent for the software is no guarantee that Apple will actually use the selfie unlocking tool in its new products, and this feature has been available for Android devices for some time now. According to Business Insider, Apple's patent also includes selfie-based security after the phone has been unlocked: "A device with the technology enabled would continue to periodically take photos of the user: If the user no longer appears in the images, the iPhone will automatically lock, blocking unauthorized intruders from accessing the device's contents."

Do you want your selfies to secure your iPhone, or would you rather stick to Touch ID and normal passwords?