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Why Some People Don't Have Fingerprints
sciencehabit writes "A small number of people in the world don't have fingerprints. The condition is known as adermatoglyphia, and one scientist has dubbed it the 'immigration delay disease' because sufferers have such a hard time entering foreign countries. In addition to smooth fingertips, they also produce less hand sweat than the average person. Now researchers have identified the genetic mutation behind the condition (abstract)."
What countries need fingerprints to enter? I've traveled in Asia and pretty much every shithole in earth and have never needed to give my fingerprint.
Google+ vs. Facebook, and why Google+ will fail
These researchers, curiously, are being sponsored by the CIA.
I'm sure that after a few years in this world, their finger tips are not blemish free. So long as they leave behind at least a trace of oil, I'd argue that these fingerprints, being much more unique, would actually make the person easier to identify.
"Researchers have identified the genetic mutation behind the condition."
Good. Can the rest of us have it now, please?
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...natural born killers?
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It's more complicated than "someone has fingerprints or they don't." The testing method matters, too. The print some people leave with the traditional ink-and-paper is substantially different from the print they leave with direct-light fingerprint scanners, which is substantially different from the print they leave with 3D sidelight fingerprint scanners. And all of these, of course, vary in comparison to latent prints, which vary depending on a host of factors.
What if you have a wart on one of your finger the first time you enter and you had it remove the second time you enter. Will you get immigration delay for surgically removing an identification element from your body?
Because Anonymous deleted them.
Ba doomp, ching!
Now there's no such thing as a person without a fingerprint. *puts on sunglasses*.
If everyone will just look this way *flash*
Since I work as a tile layer all my fingerprints gets scrubbed away when handling tiles the whole day.
I was just recently to the police office to apply for a new passport, and we had a really hard time to get visible prints on their scanner... in the end the clerk just gave up and said "ok, this is probably good enough" and accepted the scan :-)
Maybe their parents sold their fingerprints to support their MMO habits.
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One of the causes of ppl losing their fingerprints is cancer treatment. I am facing a bone marrow transplant/stem-cell transplant and one of the possible side effects is losing my fingerprints. I am not sure if this is directly from the transplant, or something from the strong chemotherapy I will endure before/during the transplant procedure. Along with my blood DNA being different from the cheek swab test, I will be a walking "CSI episode waiting to happen". Maybe I will just get some stick on fingerprints like in "Gone in 60 seconds". Elvis Lives!
technoid_
Two wrongs don't make a right, but 3 lefts do - Lew of GO magazine
I came across this in a novel by L. Neil Smith. In the book, he suggests, through the mouth of one of his characters, that there is no proof (and no way to prove) that everyone's fingerprints are different. At the time I attributed this to his extreme libertarianism. However, in the time since then I have seen numerous reports contending that no one has ever conducted a study to prove that fingerprints are unique to an individual and no references to such a study. Additionally, it appears that the acceptance of fingerprints as a means of identification came about by appeal to authority, rather than from any actual evidence as to the validity of such identification.
It seems likely to me that each person's fingerprints (those that have them) are unique. However, considering the evidence I have seen regarding how questionable the identification of individuals from fingerprints lifted at the scene (whatever scene that happens to be) by fingerprint experts has proven to be, on the occassions it has tested in a scientific manner, dubious at best.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Doubtful that you could prove they are unique, or that it would be a useful statement.
You could prove something about probability of two (possibly random) individuals having similar enough prints that they would be matched falsely when compared to some tolerance though...which I believe (from watching TV) is how DNA evidence is used.
How would you ever prove this?
No people have the same fingerprints...until we find some that do.
Of course, fingerprints have been used for over a century, and DNA has been used for a few decades, and I'm not aware of anyone who has credibly argued that they have identified the "wrong" person.
I had thought that this might be the key to becoming a successful burglar, but by the time I was old enough to actually become a burglar, my fingerprints no longer disappeared.
I'm in the biometrics industry.
Supposedly, fingerprints patterns are formed by a non-linear - chaotic, but deterministic - process. The condition for having two equal finger prints would have the initial conditions (ie, the fetus condition) to be identical with infinite precision. Even minor variations in the initial conditions will lead to widely different results. Look up for "deterministic chaos".
I can't find a reference for the finger prints being generated by a chaotic process, it seems I lost or lent someone the book with this. If I find a reference when I get back home, I'll update this.
Finger prints are more "unique" that most other distinguishing features.
For example if a witness said a criminal was a 5'9" tall male with average build, and short brown hair; police could find lots of people who meet that description. If the find a good finger print, they're more likely to only find one person that matches it.
From what I've heard, they don't usually compare finger prints line by line. Instead they look at the points where the lines curve and use that to create numerical values. Lots of people can have one point that is similar, but each point you consider eliminates a percentage of people. If you compare enough points, then the odds of a false positive approach zero.
It's sort of like if you have a checksum for a file. Many files will have the same digit in the first position, as you match more digits the it's more likely that the checksum goes with a particular file.
They are TERRISTS, that's why!
It's worse than that in that the way they test fingerprints is to look at key points, the structure of the whorls and such on them. That's like taking a bunch of hashes and then only storing information about where characters are repeated and how far apart the repeat sections are to claim the hashes are "probably" the same.
I would depress the value of testimony given by anyone who claimed some physical trait was "100%". But that said, all things are a matter of odds.
Assuming your fingerprints do exactly match those of someone else (and not just at 12 points, but everywhere), what are the odds that you live at the same time in history and at the same place as that person, and that you would also be in the area with no credible alibi at the same time the other person was committing a crime? The result need not be 100% - just "beyond reasonable doubt" - so even though I wouldn't believe the 100% argument, I could still conceivably convict someone based on such evidence.
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It's somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible to "prove" anything that isn't pure mathematics. You can estimate probabilities to within statistically significant bounds (it's 99.999% possible that you are the father of that child, etc.) Proof, as an abstraction, is much more difficult. To prove that DNA is unique, you would need to sequence every human who ever lived, is currently living, or will ever live. Disproof, by contrast, is much easier. You could disprove that DNA is unique with only 2 people (though it's very unlikely).
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You also need to provide skin samples, hair samples, retina scans, platelet values and stool samples. Plus 20 minutes of you walking like a duck.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Doesn't the DHS just use the naked shots from the mm wave scanners to identify people now?
"I see you're coming in from the arctic, Mr. Anderson." *Bahdumchi*
I think this plays into why they take all your fingers. I have a hard time believing with all the people on earth, lets narrow that down, all the people on a given continent would have a unique finger print. If you take the number of all the people AND the surface area of the finger that gets printed. That's not a lot of space to cover that many combinations of patterns. But what I do know is your finger prints differ for your fingers. I worked on an app that used your finger print to log in. During testing I set up 3 accounts for myself and used my first 3 fingers for each 3 accounts. Depending on which finger I used is which account got logged in. So although I don't believe everyone has a single unique print, the combination of your fingers together can probably narrow you down quite efficiently.
Could we use this knowledge to put that mutation into me and get rid of my fingerprints?
I would do it in a heartbeat.
I will give you that, but I do think that people give way too much credence to the fingerprint evidence that is presented in court.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
From the RSS feed headline, I thought this was an article about a James Bond-like spying ring or something. Imagine my disappointment.
I worked at the pineapple factory, the pineapples have acid and burn the fingerprints off. Now I am thief, cat burglar. Maybe murderer.
Even worse than the lack of evidence of the underlying uniqueness of the fingerprints themselves, I have heard that there are very few studies determining the reliability of fingerprint analysis - even if they are unique, if the technician makes errors you can get false positives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerprint#Validity_of_fingerprinting_for_identification
Sounds like somebody's made a huge mistake.
criminals.
You don't need to supply fingerprints here to get a passport.
I suppose I should add "yet" since our evil overlords import the worst of the US and EU laws as soon as they can. They must just be slow this time.
given a finite amount of fingerprints to test there are indeed a few ways to prove whether or not everyone (alive or tested in the past) has a unique set of fingerprints... use one of the various methods used to gather fingerprints... and use this same method to test EVERYONE... seems a pretty sure fire way to prove whether or not this is the case... though I agree there's no way to prove someone at a later date might share the same fingerprints... and then even when a dup shows up all this means is that our methods to differentiate fingerprints aren't strong enough..
As a bassist, I have mostly destroyed the fingerprints on two of my fingers from a mixture of blisters and callouses. Every couple of months the fingerprint reader on my laptop will stop working because of that. I assume if you committed a crime you could easily remove your fingerprints with some sandpaper.
because it's hard to figure out if this is a favorable mutation or an unfavorable one. TFA said that the condition might have something to do with making it easier for skin cells to fold over each other during fetal development. What might be the consequences of hindering this?
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I know that in the past, some sets of mothers and daughters had similar enough hand/fingerprints to false positive low resolution scanners on biometric locks. Based on that, I would say that the biometric data doesn't have to be identical. It would have to be "close enough" to exceed the resolution of the sensor or test in use.