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Comment by brendangregg | Hacker News Reader

For anyone thinking of using fingerprints: There's a number of people, especially some older women (due to a lifetime of hand washing dishes) and chemotherapy survivors, who no longer have legible fingerprints. Insisting all users authenticate with legible fingerprints becomes discriminatory.

I'm not saying fingerprints are bad, just that there must be a process to support those that do not have them.

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Basically anyone who washes their hands frequently (ie all medical personnel, food handlers, etc.) or does manual work with ungloved hands (including home gardening) can later in life have fingerprints so abraded as to be unidentifiable. Using a lot of hand lotion, as anyone with dry hands might, also tends to flatten the ridges. Any requirement for fingerprints as a biometric can render systems inaccessible for entire classes of people - it's a growing problem in banking for the elderly, for example.

>Using a lot of hand lotion, as anyone with dry hands might, also tends to flatten the ridges.

so, several years of corona may in the future have the side effect of many more people without finger prints.

Yes, yes... corona. That's why all the lotion! It has nothing to do with looking at pron!

I feel compelled to point out that hand lotion and hand sanitizer are not the same thing. However excessive use of hand sanitizer might have a similar effect on our fingerprints, for all I know.

Not even later in life. I spent a couple of weeks working with concrete blocks at home and I was unable to get into my workplace via the fingerprint scanner. (My fingerprints restored themselves a couple of weeks later).

My father has this problem. The last time he went for a background check they tried time and time again with an electronic scanner but it just could not get a legible scan.

After far too many unsuccessful attempts they pulled out the old ink roller and fingerprint card and called it a day with the first crack at it. At least the authorities had this option, what will happen when/if electronically scanned fingerprints are set as a hard requirement?

Well and fingerprints also require hands. Not having hands is not as uncommon as one might think.

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