👁️ FaceLock

Your Mac locks itself the moment a stranger sits down and you're not there.
An always-on macOS menu-bar app that knows your face — 100% on-device, nothing ever leaves your Mac.

---

✨ What it does

You step away from your Mac. Someone else leans in. The screen locks before they can read a thing. When you sit back down, FaceLock recognizes you and stays out of your way.

• 👤 Knows your face — enroll once; recognition runs entirely on-device with Apple's Vision framework.
• 🛡️ Locks on the rules you choose — away + stranger, any stranger, or walk-away.
• 🫥 Anti-spoof (liveness) — a blink + motion check so a held photo of you won't pass as you.
• 🕵️ Intruder log — captures a snapshot of whoever triggers a lock; review them in a gallery.
• ⏳ Pre-lock countdown — a HUD you can cancel before it locks (no more "it locked while I grabbed coffee").
• 🔔 Lock notifications — get told when and why your screen locked.
• 🧮 Temporal voting + grace period — multi-frame agreement means near-zero false locks.
• 🔋 Light & private — ~4 fps, only face embeddings stored (never images), and zero network code.

📸 Screenshots

   

Native macOS 26 Liquid Glass — menu popover (left) and settings (right).

🚀 Getting started

Requires macOS 26 (Tahoe), Xcode 16+, and XcodeGen (brew install xcodegen).

git clone https://github.com/ish-cs/facelock.git
cd facelock
xcodegen generate          # build FaceLock.xcodeproj from project.yml
open FaceLock.xcodeproj     # press ▶ Run in Xcode

Prefer the command line?

xcodebuild build -scheme FaceLock -configuration Debug -derivedDataPath build
open build/Build/Products/Debug/FaceLock.app

💡 FaceLock has no Dock icon — find the 👁️ in your menu bar (top-right).

🧭 First run

Step	Do this
1️⃣	Click the 👁️ menu-bar icon → Grant Camera Access (approve the macOS prompt).
2️⃣	Click Enroll Your Face → look at the camera, slowly turn your head. ~12 samples, a few seconds.
3️⃣	It flips to Monitoring automatically. You're protected. ✅

Want it always on? Settings → Launch at login.

🔐 Lock rules

All toggleable in Settings — mix and match.

Rule	Locks when…	Default
🎯 Strict	you're away and a stranger is present	✅ on
👥 Stranger-always	any stranger appears (even if you're here) — shoulder-surfer guard	⬜ off
🚶 Walk-away	nobody's there for the walk-away delay	⬜ off

Plus a grace period (how long the condition must hold before locking) and an auto-calibrated match sensitivity slider. The menu shows the live recognition distance so you can tune it by eye.

🧠 How it works

 Camera  ──frames (~4fps)──▶  FaceMatcher  ──result──▶  PolicyEngine  ──lock?──▶  Locker
 AVFoundation                 Vision feature-prints      rules + grace timer       login.framework
                              (owner vs stranger)        (pure, fully tested)      (SACLockScreenImmediate)

Four small, single-purpose pieces. The PolicyEngine — the part that actually decides to lock — is pure logic with 19 unit tests covering every rule, the grace timer, and flicker.

🔒 Privacy

Everything runs on your Mac. FaceLock stores only Vision feature-prints (math, not photos) in ~/Library/Application Support/FaceLock/, and contains no networking code whatsoever. Your camera frames never touch disk or the network.

🧪 Tests

xcodebuild test -scheme FaceLock -destination 'platform=macOS' -only-testing:FaceLockTests

Pure-logic tests run headless — no app launch, no camera.

⚠️ Known limitations

• Recognition uses Vision's general image feature-print (Apple exposes no public face-embedding API). It's solid, not FaceNet-grade — FaceMatcher is an isolated seam where a CoreML face model can drop in later. Tune the sensitivity slider first.
• Liveness is an RGB-camera heuristic (blink + motion): it defeats printed/screen photos, but not a video replay. The FaceTime camera has no depth sensor to do better.
• Requires macOS 26 for the native Liquid Glass UI.

---

_{Built with Swift, SwiftUI & Apple Vision. On-device, always.}