The iPhone 5S' Touch ID sensor is a game changer. It scans a user's fingerprint and stores the information for identification purposes. But it may soon have a rival already.

Researchers at the Illinois Institute of Technology have developed their own variation of the sensor called SilentSense.

The system, invented by Cheng Bo and his colleagues, learns to pick up a person's cellphone habits. It picks up fingertip size, amount of pressure put on the phone and even the way a user walks with the phone in hand. Could this be a tad bit too much?

According to a description on Cornell University Library's website, Bo and colleagues Lan Zhang and Xiang-Yang Li say that their work is "a framework to authenticate users silently and transparently by exploiting dynamics mined from the user touch behavior biometrics and the micro-movement of the device caused by user's screen-touch actions."

Based on an initial test, the system identified owners with 99% accuracy when used on a phone running Android.

What do you think? Your phone will know more about you than you do yourself.

[via New Scientist Image: Wikimedia Commons]