A little more about Apple's patents for biometrics

Apple is seeking new patents for technologies that may use advanced biometrics to protect i-devices (iphone and ipad for now). Biometrics to protect laptops and phones isn’t brand new: many models use fingerprint and voice print security, and some even venture into facial or iris scanning and recognition . Apple’s future system will go steps further than that by combining several 'soft' biometrics. Essentially, if implemented on a device, the technology could use stored information about not only the authorized user’s voice print, face and fingerprints, but also usage patterns (using keystroke modalities for example) and even heartbeat. Should the system suspect that the user is not the phone’s owner, in the case of theft, the device could lock out the thief and send an e-mail with the phone’s location and the thief’s photo to the authorized user. It could also inform the owner (and credit card companies and banks) of all activity conducted on the phone by the thief via call logs and keystroke information. Finally, to prevent the thief from using any information stored on the device for nefarious purposes, the system could save data on the phone to a remote location and then wipe the device clean, rendering it secure from data theft.

http://www.tmcnet.com/biomag/articles/96251-apple-filing-james-bond-style-biometricsecurity- applications.htm