Several years ago I read the book Fingerprints by Colin Beavan [0] and it was really eye opening how different life was before we had modern forms of identification.
Example 1: In countries that had little formal legal structures and rudimentary identification (e.g. India in the early 1800s), it was incredibly easy to be a criminal and just move from town to town while acquiring new identities. In other words, there was a huge upside to becoming a career criminal since it was both difficult to catch you (no forensic evidence) and even if you were caught, you could just reboot your life.
Example 2: He mentions a case where a gentleman was charged TWICE for crimes that were later found to have been committed by someone else who had only a passing resemblance.
I read this book before Twitter/Facebook became ubiquitous and every like, share, comment was public knowledge but even at the time, it was mind boggling how different "identity" was back then.
The flipside of this would be that anyone from out-of-town would be shunned under the assumption that they had left their previous town for negative reasons.
Isn't photo ID much more relevant for the above than fingerprints? Usually fingerprints are used to investigate crime scenes, not to ascertain identity of an already known person (you don't normally ascertain that this person here is Alex A by their fingerprints - you use them to see if Alex A was in the room where the jewelry got stolen).
I was watching a show on TV last night where they were minutely examining a newly discovered photo of Lincoln to see if it was really Lincoln or someone else. One analyst gave it an "85% probability it was Lincoln".
