The reels are right about one thing: you can unlock a MacBook by looking at it now. The tool is called Glance, it is free and open source, and it appeared on GitHub this month and collected a thousand stars in its first days. It is not Face ID, and the person who wrote it says so in capital letters at the top of the README. This post is how to set it up, what each step is actually doing, and the settings we would change before trusting it with anything.
We read the source and the documentation rather than installing it on a machine that holds client stores, for a reason that gets its own post: Glance is not Face ID, and here is what a webcam can and cannot verify. If your Mac is a personal one, read on.
What Glance is
Glance is a small macOS app by Jonathan Zhou, MIT licensed, at github.com/jonnyoo/glance. It watches the webcam when your Mac locks or wakes, decides whether the face it sees is yours, and if it is, types your password into the lock screen for you. The animation lives in the notch, in the style of the iPhone’s Dynamic Island; Macs without a notch get a floating pill instead.
That last sentence is the important one. macOS does not let a third-party app authorise a login. There is no door for Glance to open, so it does what a person would do: it types the password. Everything about how the app is built follows from that constraint, and so should everything about how you configure it.
What you need
- macOS 15 Sequoia or later.
- Apple silicon or an Intel Mac. The recognition model runs through Core ML and works on both.
- A Mac with Touch ID, in practice. The key that encrypts your face data and your password is stored in the Keychain behind Touch ID or your login password, and you will be asked for it when a session starts.
Setting it up
1. Install. Download Glance.dmg from the project’s releases page, open it, and drag Glance to Applications. Open it from there. The release is a signed build, so Gatekeeper lets it through without the right-click dance that most small open-source Mac apps need.
2. Grant three permissions. Glance asks for Camera, to see you; Accessibility, to type into the lock screen; and Touch ID, to gate the encryption key. The Accessibility permission is the one to pause on. An app with Accessibility can type anywhere, not just at the lock screen. Glance uses it for one thing, but you are trusting the app, not the permission, and this is the moment to decide whether you do.
3. Enrol your face. Onboarding asks you to turn your head through nine positions while the camera watches. Each frame is turned into a 512-number description of your face, called an embedding, using an ArcFace model, and the image itself is thrown away. Nothing that looks like a photograph of you is written to disk. The embeddings are encrypted with AES-GCM and stored locally.
Enrol in the light you will actually use. If you work by a window in the day and a lamp at night, the app lets you enrol several identities, or several versions of yourself: glasses on, glasses off, with the beard. Each can be switched off without being deleted.
4. Enter your password once. This is what the app types later. It is encrypted with a 256-bit key that lives in the macOS Keychain and requires your presence, meaning Touch ID or the login password, to release. The key is only held in memory while a Glance session is authorised.
5. Choose when it fires. On wake, on lock, or when you press the space bar at the lock screen. Any combination. We would start with space bar only: you decide when it looks, and nothing happens because the lid opened in a bag.
6. Set liveness to Heavy. Liveness is the part that tries to tell a person from a picture of a person. Light mode only looks for evidence of a spoof: the glare of a phone screen, a rectangle around the face that looks like a device. Heavy mode also looks for evidence of a live face: three-dimensional geometry in the landmarks, the way the nose moves against the cheeks when you turn your head, blinks. Light is faster. Heavy is the only setting under which the author claims it defeats a printed photo or a photo on a phone. Turn it on and leave it on.
7. Set the session to re-lock. A Glance session, the state in which the app holds the decryption key and is allowed to type, expires after an idle period you choose. Make it short. A session that lasts all day means a Mac left open at a café keeps its keys in memory all day.
What happens at the lock screen
When the trigger fires, the notch animation opens and the camera looks for a face. Glance will type your password only if all five of these are true at once: a session is authorised, the Mac is really at the lock screen, an enabled identity matches above the similarity threshold, the liveness checks accept the face, and the Accessibility permission is still granted. Recognition and liveness are separate checks and both have to pass. If either fails, the notch shows the failure and you hover to retry, or type your password as you always did.
There is a hidden debug panel the author calls Face Lab, reached by clicking the app icon five times on the About screen, that shows the live similarity and liveness scores. Ten minutes in there with a printed photo of yourself is more informative than anything in this post.
Things worth knowing before you rely on it
- You can choose which camera it uses, and a different one for an external display, which matters if you work with the lid closed.
- Animations can be turned off entirely, in which case Glance is invisible and the lock screen simply fills itself in.
- Your enrolment and your stored password can be edited or deleted from the app at any time, and the encrypted files go with them. Deleting the app without doing that first leaves them behind like any other app data.
- The project is not accepting pull requests. Forks are welcome; feedback goes through the author’s site.
Who this is for
A personal MacBook at home, on a desk, where the threat is the inconvenience of typing and not a stranger with a video of your face. In that setting Glance is a genuinely pleasant piece of software and the notch animation is better than it has any right to be.
If the Mac is the one you run a business from, or holds admin sessions for other people’s Shopify stores, read the next post before you install it. Our team Macs stay on Touch ID and a password, and that post is why.
