The Surprising History and Future of Fingerprints

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.

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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...