A family with no fingerprints
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Most of these employees work in the fields handling heavy equipment. Most of them had no fingerprint since they'd been worn out. We ended up using palm recognition.
The idea that "all people have a unique fingerprint" is a widely believed falsehood.
Even the tools or superglue I use prevents my fingerprints to recognized most of the time. And that is just for hobby.
There were a couple of instances where users would be missing fingers or had deformities that would throw the machine off. In these cases we would have them put their left hand upside down in the device and map that instead.
In cases where there was issues with the original and alt methods we could remove the check altogether (employ would place their hand and it would go through so nothing was suspicious). This only happened once in the hundreds of thousands of people I'd deployed to.
As an aside, this method of tracking users in and out of work was markedly more digestible than reading someone's fingerprints and increased user adoption.
Working in 1st 2nd and 3rd world we heard all kinds of stories from employees not wanting to provide fingerprints from not wanting to be framed for murder to stealing a part of your soul by extracting sacred finger marks (similar story to photos in some cultures).
https://us.allegion.com/en/home/products/categories/biometri...
Anyone who thinks of the condition as a disease or deformity or handicap, is likely to agree that it should be "cured" if possible. After all, it's a public health harm to everyone else allowing them to breed and inflict their deformity on innocent babies that would have otherwise been normal.
And then one day an actual disease based on a germ of some sort comes along that just loves to live in the valleys of human fingerprints, and the entire human race dies because we erased the few people we had that would have been immune.
I don't understand the excuse for failing to recognize that the value of diversity outweighs it's inconvenience. I don't know how long that has been grade-school knowledge. If not multiple hundreds of years, sure at least it's been a known thing since before the brith of any currently living person?
We are turning ourselves into human Cavendish banannas.
Eugenics have fallen out of fashion many decades ago, and most countries have laws to protect people with unusual medical conditions/disabilities - typically, the more developed they are (i.e. the more resources they're able to spend), the better the protections.
Iceland only sees 1-2 births with Down syndrome per year, and not because they've identified a way to prevent a full or partial copy of chromosome 21. They test and terminate.
My personal experience (and that of many friends) is that western OBGYNs push prenatal testing and corrective action quite aggressively. (There is reasonable room to disagree about what their motives are, and the profit motive may be sufficient for such testing.) And many people want it.
We can debate the ethical implications separately, but regardless of where one lands on that issue, eugenics has very much been normalized.
Bunching those together only seems to empower religious extremists who want to prevent any kind of abortion. (see Poland recently)
If you write your idea thoroughly and leave no room for misinterpretation, it's TLDR.
If you write your idea as just the highlight of it's essence, people take the figurative/impressionistic words literally.
I do not know how to avoid both conditions. I can only ever manage to avoid one (either one) at the expense of suffering the other.
From: https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2017/08/17/down-syn...
In the US, only 2% of expecting mothers have amniocentesis or CVS tests, but of those with confirmed positives the termination rate is 75%: https://www.kcdsg.org/files/content/termination%20rate.pdf
Did you think that I was seriously suggesting a disease could do that literally? Have you never encountered an idea that needed to be amplified to show it's essence?
The real life form of the process, of which eugenics is the ridiculous hyperbolic contrast=100% version, is simple pressure, discrimination, disadvantage, death by 1000 cuts, attrition etc.
Things which stick out tend to get eroded smooth. Simple as that. Not freaking literal eugenics.
When someone doesn't have a particular, not inherently required characteristic to access something, there should be a series of fallbacks, but all too often this just excludes people.
This can be seen in all areas of life, in different severities:
- the entire topic of accessibility is about letting people make use of the abilities they have despite the ones they don't have. Not having functional legs doesn't have to prevent people from filing a document in the office.
- technology which once was optional but never essential becomes required with time. Booking a doctor's visit over the phone only, buying goods over the internet only, filing taxes only with a computer, accessing a bank account only with an Android program. All that with no fallback to the post office or a personal visit.
- the requirement to pass payments through an intermediary is getting more common. Gone are the days of paying bills or getting salary directly at the office, and the sphere of buying at the point of sale is losing the cash fallback, if stories from Asia are to be believed.
None of the technological changes are bad as options, but when they become the only choices, they work to disenfranchise people, especially ones related to banking and travel freedom. Debit/credit cards are not accessible to a huge chunk of the world's population, and even in Europe, getting a bank account as an immigrant can be hard.
Another thing that strikes me in the article is calling the condition "disease", without providing any evidence that it has any negative health impact. On the other hand, it matches the definition of disability as something the society imposes [0]. That would make this a paradoxical case of someone not impaired but disabled.
[0] https://aeon.co/essays/what-does-it-mean-to-consider-yoursel...
To take a tech example, TLS downgrade attacks: you want to keep things working for older clients, but it’s possible for some party in the middle to intercept the traffic and feign non-support of the newer version (or stronger cipher suites), in order to push both parties to the older version or cipher suite, and if that older version or cipher suite has anything broken about it, now you have an easier target.
Applied here, if you allow a no-fingerprints route that’s less secure, be aware that attackers will devise ways of getting onto that path for their own malicious purposes. Perhaps they’ll forge a doctor’s certificate, perhaps use some kind of acid that temporarily removes their fingerprints, that kind of thing.
It’s an unfortunate balance. With TLS, you decide eventually at some point that the problems of still supporting the old, less-secure version are too serious, and so tough luck for people stuck on the old version. With this, I certainly hope it would err much more on the side of not locking people out of the System. (Fortunately, although this particular condition is very rare, there are a much larger number of people that have damaged fingerprints or fingerprints that don’t work in whatever readers get used.)
For one-offs like obtaining an ID card, a one-time imposition of a bit more time might be reasonable. "We've installed fingerprint readers at every location where you can apply for an ID card but retina readers are more expensive so they are only available at the main government office" may be fine if you're referring to a passport issued every ten years. But requiring a fingerprint for a SIM card yet having no backup for that at point-of-sale is not.
This is the flaw in every single system designed by people who largely have no experience with people who have a difference in physical or mental characteristics than the designers. We see it in facial recognition trained primarily on people of a certain skin pigment. Social systems designed by people who are neurotypical. Transport systems implemented by people assuming a base level of technological or literacy skill. The list goes on.
The people doing the designing aren't being inherently mean or malicious, they're simply not thinking. And not thinking is very easy, but makes systems that are very impenetrable to people not included in that thinking.
Anything which is a non-standard fallback with limited use is likely to be less secure. Not because the method would be inherently worse, but just because reduced use means that less attention and effort goes into building and maintaining it.
The fact that the government workers are letting buggy software determine eligibility for drivers licenses and passports is the real issue here. It’s really sad.
Just reading this makes me so frustrated. I can’t imagine how frustrating it would be to be them. I hope this article helps these men get the exposure they need to end this.
It also seems to go against disability/accessibility laws. There must be more people that don't have fingerprints, like people with missing limbs.
Knew a girl that had fingers but no arms.
Of course the software should be able to detect that there is no fingerprint and require the operator of that software to check for the identity by other means.
Sometimes we don't always have human operators and more things are automated.
Let me repeat that - never rely a 100% of any piece of biometric or any other type of authentication. Have a fail-safe mode for each.
And what about people with missing fingers or hands? Or those who work manual labor and their fingerprints simply get scarred too much to match their records?
As always with these techniques: step one is to introduce a system that covers 99.99% of people. Step two is to let the remainder fight their way through court while getting financially ruined until a judge orders you to facilitate them too. Governments can mitigate step two by just hoping these exceptions will give up.
[1] About 2-3% if you trust this random comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/62c3oj/m...
I can re-train the fingerprints, and they work for some weeks again.
A more successful workaround I've found is teaching the machine the side of my finger, not the pad.
Face ID on the other hand has been robust.
Surely people are born without hands — can they not get passports? A driver's licence I would perhaps understand, but certainly they should be able to be issued a passport?
Since the pandemic started, the extra regular and thorough hand-washing caused my phone to stop recognising my fingerprint most of the time.
Now to unlock I usually have to use another method instead, and some financial apps won't let me in or let me confirm transactions at all because they require the previously registered fingerprint, so I have to use the web version of those services.
Blind pilots or surgeons aren't a thing.
Not a problem most of the time, but he has real difficulty getting through American airport security.