August And Yale Smart Locks Can Now Use Fingerprints, Faces For Security

Smart locks have been offering hi-tech ways to secure our homes but their apps ironically only provide old and less secure ways of securing access to those locks. Many phones these days provide biometric security in the form of face recognition and fingerprints to have a more accurate and foolproof way to gain access to a smartphone or files. Finally, August and Yale smart locks can now take advantage of these same technologies but the feature comes with one important catch.

Prior to this, the only way you could remotely lock or unlock an August or Yale smart lock would be to key in your PIN code. That will still be the only method available for phones that don't have fingerprint scanners or secure facial recognition. But if you do have a more modern smartphone, you can opt to use those security features to gain access to the lock instead.

The one important caveat is that this feature works only via Wi-Fi or mobile data. That means you need to have either an August Wi-Fi Smart Lock or a Connect Wi-Fi bridge. Other than that, you're good to go.

It's rather curious that it took the company this long to roll out such an essential security feature. Internet-connected smart locks have already been a bit contentious because of their potential to be hacked. Securing the app, which is one way to get direct access to the locks, should have been a top priority early on.

And for even more peace of mind, August is providing a new "Hide Entry Codes" feature that will, as the name suggests, hide codes from plain sight until the access has been authenticated. This ensures that those access codes are safe even when you lose access to the phone. August also assures that simply viewing the lock status won't trigger security checks in order to provide "a seamless app experience".