How to Temporarily Disable Touch ID and Face ID with Siri on iPhone or iPad

How to Temporarily Disable Touch ID and Face ID with Siri on iPhone or iPad

If you ever find yourself wanting to disable Touch ID or Face ID authentication methods on an iPhone or iPad, you can easily temporarily disable the biometric authentication in iOS by using a simple Siri command. With Touch ID or Face ID temporarily disabled, the iPhone or iPad must then be unlocked with a passcode instead of either a fingerprint or face scan. The trick is quite simple, simply ask Siri whose iPhone it is. If that sounds familiar to you, its because its the same method used , and coincidentally it will also lock down the biometric authentication features of the device. You can verify this yourself by triggering Siri and asking Whose iPhone is this, and then testing out Face ID or Touch ID authentication. The biometric authentication will not work and instead it will say that Your passcode is required to enable Touch ID or Your passcode is require dot enable Face ID and bring up the typical passcode entry screen of iOS. Yes, I know it sounds weird, but you must ask Whose iPhone is this . If you ask Whose iPad is this then Siri tells you to go to apple.com for some reason instead. Maybe this Siri quirk will be resolved some time, but for now be sure to refer to your iPad as an iPhone instead to lock it down from biometric access. Note that when asking a device whose iPhone is this, Siri will nearly always transcribe the request as Whos iPhone is this, which it has been doing for probably because whose and who is sound similar. Regardless of Siri transcribing the wrong word or not, the feature still works, just remember to ask Whose iPhone is this on iPhone and iPad, because Siri currently does not know how to find ownership of an iPad unless you call it an iPhone. A potential significant advantage to the Siri approach is that it can enacted and used entirely , meaning you can disable Touch ID and Face ID with a device that you dont have directly on your person. So for example if the iPhone or iPad is sitting on a coffee table face up, you could say Hey Siri, whose iPhone is this and it would lock down biometric authentication attempts. There are other ways to disable Touch ID and Face ID temporarily, for example you can and then canceling the shutdown request, or by pressing it five times repeatedly, or you can disable Touch ID with repeated attempts with the improper fingerprint. And of course you can always , disable Face ID, or at all too, and by disabling biometric authentication the passcode must always be used to unlock an iPhone or iPad instead. If you enjoyed this tip for privacy or security reasons, you may also that apply to iPad as well.