A patent originally filed back in June 2012, looks to resolve some of the potential cheating that was possible on the earlier Face Unlock ‘liveness’ that allowed hacking with the use of photo editing.

Mashable notes that Google's new (old) patent expands the range of available gestures to a wink, a smile, an ocular movement, a frown, tongue protrusion and eyebrow movement, as well as several other facial expressions.

After capturing the gestures with the device's camera, the system could check whether the person actually made the sequence of movements needed to create the facial expression, instead of merely using still photographs, as shown in the video below.



To further increase security, the device could also ask for a series of gestures to be performed in a specific order.

A spokesman for Google told the BBC that they did not discuss individual patents, but noted that it filed a variety of ideas that its employees came up with.

"Some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don't," he added.

This is still in patent form only, and Google says that "Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patent applications."

All the images needed to make the function work properly would be quite useful for the archiving of your personal information by the NSA. I think I will stick with my alpha-numerical passwords, thank you very much!