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Comment by xahrepap | Hacker News Reader

Sounds to me these men are victims of abusive software bugs. They have a finger print... it may not be unique or normal. But pressing their inked finger onto paper will leave a print. I assume the software is looking for common pieces of a fingerprint to work. Said software isn’t considering the edge case of a smooth or mostly smooth finger pad.

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.

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It's not a software bug. People did this sort of thing before fingerprints. It used to be fairly common for immigrants and refugees to not know their birthday. The beurocracy was often unable to cope with that idea, as they wanted to use name and date of birth as the unique identifier. A lot of people just made something up to make immigration happy, which then resulted in problems down the line as they didn't recall what they made up.

Indeed! As a software developer in Hong Kong, I learned that the "month of birth" and "day of birth" are optional fields - some people who fled from Communist China to Hong Kong only knew their birth year, and the ID card just shows something like "1946" instead of a full date.

Totally agree with you. Bureaucracy/red tape at its worst.

It also seems to go against disability/accessibility laws. There must be more people that don't have fingerprints, like people with missing limbs.

Washing dishes and some types of work may also erase fingerprints. Friend had troubles to enter US as a tourist.

I’m a woodworker. Hand Sanding always wears away my fingerprints so that I have to manually type in the password on my phone instead of using Touch ID for about a week afterwards until they grow back.

A fingerprint is there to either identify you or confirm that it is you. Now, if we would allow the software to accept a smooth fingerprint as assign it to a person then this would allow anybody to impersonate that person without additional identification means. This is not a software bug, but a security feature.

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.

What’s the protocol for someone with no fingers?

Knew a girl that had fingers but no arms.

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