Printed Photos Defeat Most Commercial Smart Locks

Facial recognition smart locks are proliferating—Level Lock, Loona. Now the Dutch startup Nuki have pushed the technology into homes where a photograph used to require a key.

The pitch is frictionless. Your hands are full of groceries, your face unlocks the door, and there is no fumbling or delay. This is progress.

The argument assumes that the friction being removed was merely inconvenient—that a keypad or physical key imposed nothing but delay on something fundamentally simple. An unlock is an unlock, and faster is better. This assumption collapses under scrutiny.

A physical key or passcode is hard to spoof because spoofing requires you to physically possess the object or know the information—facial recognition is not. In 2019, researchers at Sensetime demonstrated that a high-resolution printed photograph could fool most commercial smart locks. A deepfake video performed even better. The friction keeping bad actors out was not inconvenience—it was authentication strength.

When a company like Level Lock markets a face-unlock door, it is not removing inconvenience and leaving security intact. It is trading one form of security for another—moving from "something you have or know" to "something you are." Your face exists in the world, in photographs, surveillance footage, and social media. It can be printed or synthesized. The real question is not whether convenience is worth privacy risk.

That tradeoff is not rhetorical. Every time you make a system more permissive, something has to give. In this case, what gives is the thing you installed the lock to protect. The friction being removed was protecting you.