9 ms·

A family with no fingerprints

121 points by lnguyen 6y ago

octoberfranklin 6y ago
This is the "killer app" for CRISPR. At least I'd pay megabux for it.
- m463 6y ago
  What if they switch to retinal scans?
  - ddevault 6y ago
    Some people don't have eyes.
    - inglor_cz 6y ago
      True, but that might not be a limitation for some implementations, such as authenticating employees coming to specific jobs. Blind pilots or surgeons aren't a thing.
      - ravi-delia 6y ago
        In the future they may be, which brings up another issue: what about people who lop out their eyes for a better replacement?
        m463 6y ago
        Are you talking about Tom Cruise? :)
- bpodgursky 6y ago
  CRISPR is not going to modify your existing fingerprints -- are you saying you'd pay megabux to pass it down to your children?
dimitar 6y ago
Yet another proof you need another factor of authentication. From my experience with multiple mass enrolments of fingerprint authentication of software (more than a million people combined) about 20% don't have usable fingerprints. 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?
- Freak_NL 6y ago
  Small correction: biometric properties are a form of identification, not authentication. Identification of the body part in question, not the person that is (as elegantly demonstrated by Wesley Snipes in Demolition Man). 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.
  - dimitar 6y ago
    Well if you want to get really technical, often identification works just fine, but then you get issues when you do verification, for example in authentication.
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    Why lose the game if you write the rules? Governments create the laws that judges rule on.
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      Because it's incompetence and malicious neglect – if it required any positive action, they'd find it easier just to fix the system.
  - ravi-delia 6y ago
    It would qualify as 'something you have', no? No different than a password proves you are something that knows a password, or a yubikey proving that you are someone who owns a particular yubikey. It would seem that without some yet unknown mindprinting technique everything is an identification method.
rhn_mk1 6y ago
It's disappointing how rigid society can be: it's my way or the highway. 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-yourself-a-disabled-person https://aeon.co/essays/what-does-it-mean-to-consider-yoursel...
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  Yet at the same time, that series of fallbacks has a tendency to become an attack vector on the process and a weakness in the system. 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.)
rwmj 6y ago
Quite a significant proportion of people have fingerprints which cannot be read[1]. Phone fingerprint readers never work. This causes no end of trouble with airport immigration in various places. I spent a couple of hours in a back room at Boston airport while various people attempted to read my fingerprints (I have them, but they never work in those airport machines). [1] About 2-3% if you trust this random comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/62c3oj/my_fingerprints_cannot_be_recognized_and_its/dflvwbj/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/62c3oj/m...
- clort 6y ago
  Why do they not work though? I mean, the reader should just be reading a series of lines. Are they too close together in your case or something, or too twirly? I appreciate that this may be a personal question but I hope you can overlook this given that we are on a semi-technical forum. It seems an interesting problem (though I am not a fingerprint engineer)
  - yencabulator 6y ago
    Personally, my fingerprints often fail to read the same way over some weeks of dry climate, especially if I've done any manual labor. And before you say anything about dry skin, putting lotion on is a temporary DoS attack on the fingerprint scanners I own, so that's not great either. 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.
    - wenc 6y ago
      Thanks for the tip. I have iPhones and iPads that have fingerprint readers and they all invariably fail to read my prints after a while (And I have 3-4 prints stored per finger). It’s frustrating. Sometimes it’s due to dryness but other times I have no explanation for. Face ID on the other hand has been robust.
  - rwmj 6y ago
    You can barely see them - the skin looks mostly smooth - and they are covered in calluses and scratches. (I assume the scratches are unique, but probably not a permanent identifying pattern!)
WhyNotHugo 6y ago
Over ten years ago, I used to work for a company that provided system [and device] to track when employees arrived and left the building. 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.
- gbraad 6y ago
  It should always be a combination of biometrics; from fingerprint to retina, etc. Even the tools or superglue I use prevents my fingerprints to recognized most of the time. And that is just for hobby.
- cryptixvi 6y ago
  Similar story here. The company I worked for provided devices which would create and read a topological map of the back someone's right hand. 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/biometrics.html https://us.allegion.com/en/home/products/categories/biometri...
- enw 6y ago
  Had the same issue with skateboarding, as holding the grip tape would scrape off my fingerprint, making Touch ID terribly annoying to use.
- Brian_K_White 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
stevespang 6y ago
palm prints are standard now along with fingerprints, the creases within palms and fingers are verifiable.
tamaharbor 6y ago
Wow! Using fingerprints for voting! What kind of crazy country uses that?
computerfriend 6y ago
I once watched someone crash every fingerprint reader in an extremely high traffic border crossing. The police kept asking him to try the next one, much to the dismay of everyone queueing. The machines would BSOD and they'd shut that kiosk. At the time, I joked that his fingerprints were malware or specifically designed to cause a buffer overflow somehow.
- lixtra 6y ago
  I would suspect a static electric discharge. Walking to the next scanner on a carpet could be enough to recharge.
lqet 6y ago
> "They seemed confused when I went to buy a Sim [card], their software kept freezing every time I put my finger on the sensor"
xahrepap 6y ago
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.
- bartvk 6y ago
  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.
- treeman79 6y ago
  What’s the protocol for someone with no fingers? Knew a girl that had fingers but no arms.
- jankotek 6y ago
  Washing dishes and some types of work may also erase fingerprints. Friend had troubles to enter US as a tourist.
  - irrational 6y ago
    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.
- nitwit005 6y ago
  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.
h1fra 6y ago
what about people with no limb? (wether genetical or accidental) seems the law is way too rigid and exclude people by lazyness/stupidity
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
How would much of this work for a handless man? 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?
mattkevan 6y ago
Friend has bad eczema and occasionally loses his fingerprints. Not a problem most of the time, but he has real difficulty getting through American airport security.
rgarrett88 6y ago
Scarification seems like it might would be worth the trouble. I wonder if any of them tried.
heelix 6y ago
Had to deal with fingerprinting for a couple work gigs. One thing that really messed up the process was me putting in bathroom tile. Between me using my fingers to smooth the grout and other manhandling/construction - I apparently wore off the prints enough to cause issues with the reader.
- irrational 6y ago
  Same thing happens to me when manually sanding and doing any concrete work without gloves. The sandpaper and concrete acid remove enough of my fingerprint so as to not be recognizable anymore.
irrational 6y ago
They must have a protocol for people with no hands. Can’t they do whatever they do for them for people with no fingerprints?
shalmanese 6y ago
"Falsehoods programmers believe about fingerprints"
jlokier 6y ago
Prior to the pandemic my phone could be reliably unlocked with my fingerprint, and I could access my bank accounts and confirm transactions with them. 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.

121 points by lnguyen 6y ago

octoberfranklin 6y ago

This is the "killer app" for CRISPR. At least I'd pay megabux for it.

m463 6y ago
What if they switch to retinal scans?
- ddevault 6y ago
  Some people don't have eyes.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    True, but that might not be a limitation for some implementations, such as authenticating employees coming to specific jobs. Blind pilots or surgeons aren't a thing.
    - ravi-delia 6y ago
      In the future they may be, which brings up another issue: what about people who lop out their eyes for a better replacement?
      - m463 6y ago
        Are you talking about Tom Cruise? :)
bpodgursky 6y ago
CRISPR is not going to modify your existing fingerprints -- are you saying you'd pay megabux to pass it down to your children?

dimitar 6y ago

Yet another proof you need another factor of authentication. From my experience with multiple mass enrolments of fingerprint authentication of software (more than a million people combined) about 20% don't have usable fingerprints. 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?

Freak_NL 6y ago
Small correction: biometric properties are a form of identification, not authentication. Identification of the body part in question, not the person that is (as elegantly demonstrated by Wesley Snipes in Demolition Man). 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.
- dimitar 6y ago
  Well if you want to get really technical, often identification works just fine, but then you get issues when you do verification, for example in authentication.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  Why lose the game if you write the rules? Governments create the laws that judges rule on.
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    Because it's incompetence and malicious neglect – if it required any positive action, they'd find it easier just to fix the system.
- ravi-delia 6y ago
  It would qualify as 'something you have', no? No different than a password proves you are something that knows a password, or a yubikey proving that you are someone who owns a particular yubikey. It would seem that without some yet unknown mindprinting technique everything is an identification method.

rhn_mk1 6y ago

It's disappointing how rigid society can be: it's my way or the highway. 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-yourself-a-disabled-person https://aeon.co/essays/what-does-it-mean-to-consider-yoursel...

chrismorgan 6y ago
Yet at the same time, that series of fallbacks has a tendency to become an attack vector on the process and a weakness in the system. 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.)

rwmj 6y ago

Quite a significant proportion of people have fingerprints which cannot be read[1]. Phone fingerprint readers never work. This causes no end of trouble with airport immigration in various places. I spent a couple of hours in a back room at Boston airport while various people attempted to read my fingerprints (I have them, but they never work in those airport machines). [1] About 2-3% if you trust this random comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/62c3oj/my_fingerprints_cannot_be_recognized_and_its/dflvwbj/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/62c3oj/m...

clort 6y ago
Why do they not work though? I mean, the reader should just be reading a series of lines. Are they too close together in your case or something, or too twirly? I appreciate that this may be a personal question but I hope you can overlook this given that we are on a semi-technical forum. It seems an interesting problem (though I am not a fingerprint engineer)
- yencabulator 6y ago
  Personally, my fingerprints often fail to read the same way over some weeks of dry climate, especially if I've done any manual labor. And before you say anything about dry skin, putting lotion on is a temporary DoS attack on the fingerprint scanners I own, so that's not great either. 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.
  - wenc 6y ago
    Thanks for the tip. I have iPhones and iPads that have fingerprint readers and they all invariably fail to read my prints after a while (And I have 3-4 prints stored per finger). It’s frustrating. Sometimes it’s due to dryness but other times I have no explanation for. Face ID on the other hand has been robust.
- rwmj 6y ago
  You can barely see them - the skin looks mostly smooth - and they are covered in calluses and scratches. (I assume the scratches are unique, but probably not a permanent identifying pattern!)

WhyNotHugo 6y ago

Over ten years ago, I used to work for a company that provided system [and device] to track when employees arrived and left the building. 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.

gbraad 6y ago
It should always be a combination of biometrics; from fingerprint to retina, etc. Even the tools or superglue I use prevents my fingerprints to recognized most of the time. And that is just for hobby.
cryptixvi 6y ago
Similar story here. The company I worked for provided devices which would create and read a topological map of the back someone's right hand. 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/biometrics.html https://us.allegion.com/en/home/products/categories/biometri...
enw 6y ago
Had the same issue with skateboarding, as holding the grip tape would scrape off my fingerprint, making Touch ID terribly annoying to use.
Brian_K_White 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

stevespang 6y ago

palm prints are standard now along with fingerprints, the creases within palms and fingers are verifiable.

tamaharbor 6y ago

Wow! Using fingerprints for voting! What kind of crazy country uses that?

computerfriend 6y ago

I once watched someone crash every fingerprint reader in an extremely high traffic border crossing. The police kept asking him to try the next one, much to the dismay of everyone queueing. The machines would BSOD and they'd shut that kiosk. At the time, I joked that his fingerprints were malware or specifically designed to cause a buffer overflow somehow.

lixtra 6y ago
I would suspect a static electric discharge. Walking to the next scanner on a carpet could be enough to recharge.

lqet 6y ago

> "They seemed confused when I went to buy a Sim [card], their software kept freezing every time I put my finger on the sensor"

xahrepap 6y ago

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.

bartvk 6y ago
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.
treeman79 6y ago
What’s the protocol for someone with no fingers? Knew a girl that had fingers but no arms.
jankotek 6y ago
Washing dishes and some types of work may also erase fingerprints. Friend had troubles to enter US as a tourist.
- irrational 6y ago
  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.
nitwit005 6y ago
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.

h1fra 6y ago

what about people with no limb? (wether genetical or accidental) seems the law is way too rigid and exclude people by lazyness/stupidity

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

How would much of this work for a handless man? 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?

mattkevan 6y ago

Friend has bad eczema and occasionally loses his fingerprints. Not a problem most of the time, but he has real difficulty getting through American airport security.

rgarrett88 6y ago

Scarification seems like it might would be worth the trouble. I wonder if any of them tried.

heelix 6y ago

Had to deal with fingerprinting for a couple work gigs. One thing that really messed up the process was me putting in bathroom tile. Between me using my fingers to smooth the grout and other manhandling/construction - I apparently wore off the prints enough to cause issues with the reader.

irrational 6y ago
Same thing happens to me when manually sanding and doing any concrete work without gloves. The sandpaper and concrete acid remove enough of my fingerprint so as to not be recognizable anymore.

irrational 6y ago

They must have a protocol for people with no hands. Can’t they do whatever they do for them for people with no fingerprints?

shalmanese 6y ago

"Falsehoods programmers believe about fingerprints"

jlokier 6y ago

Prior to the pandemic my phone could be reliably unlocked with my fingerprint, and I could access my bank accounts and confirm transactions with them. 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.