
The Surprising History and Future of Fingerprints - prostoalex
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/05/15/the-surprising-history-and-future-of-fingerprints/
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aphx
In the US criminal justice system (and likely most others), there is no
standard for how to _systematically_ compare fingerprint images--as
distinguished from scanning a finger itself. The biometric machines are good
at saying, "the surface being scanned has the features I'm looking for." But
they can't take a latent print (e.g. lifted from a drinking glass or door
knob) and match it to another (including one made "professionally" with an ink
blotter) in a defensible way.

It turns out that fingerprint examination depends hugely on examiner
judgement. That judgement is quite susceptible to several biases, such as a
detective saying, "hey, we've got prints and someone in custody, can you match
the prints?"

TV shows like CSI etc. have trained us to think of fingerprint identification
of criminals as something like public/private key signing, but it's not nearly
that trustworthy. The error rate is in the neighborhood of 15-30%!

The result is that fingerprint-comparison results are presented as facts when
they are closer to guesses. This ends up convicting innocent people and
letting guilty people go free.

If you would like to work on this, please contact me!

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pitiburi
It's amazing how US-UK centered this is. Talking about fingerprints history
and not even mentioning the first time it was developed and used in criminal
forensics? They talk about novels talking about using it, but the actual first
case in which was used to solve a crime was in the 1890s, and the whole
technique was invented on site and developed there, in Argentina [1]. But,
hey, not english speakers, so probably only barbarians who know nothing about
technology. [1]
[https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/visibleproofs/galleries/c...](https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/visibleproofs/galleries/cases/vucetich.html)

