Apple aims to ditch iPhone passcodes For example, a thief sitting on a bus may notice the four characters that an unsuspecting person entered on the person's smart phone. As another example, a thief may pick up a tablet computer in a public place and discover, based on finger prints on the display of the tablet computer, which characters were recently selected by the owner of the tablet computer. The proposed would not necessarily be based on identifying people, it added. For instance, a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge could be associated by the iPhone owner with the digits 5341 because they are the last digits of the phone number of someone they met there. "Thus, '5341' must be entered whenever that image is displayed as part of the authentication process," Apple explained. The firm is believed to be exploring other ways it could replace the iOS passcode system. In 2011 Apple also acquired Authentec, a biometrics company, hinting at the possibility of fingerprint recognition. It has also filed several parents related to facial recognition, whereby the iPhone or iPad would identify its legitimate owner from their facial features. Such technology has already been implemented in Android, but it has been shown that it is possible to unlock handsets by showing them a photo of the owner. The idea of asking users to authenticate their identity by recognising faces is not completely original either. In 2010 Facebook implemented a system that allows members to recover forgotten passwords by identifying their friends' profile pictures.