> You can’t extract someone’s fingerprint from a gym’s fingerprint scanning system and run it through a background check database, for example. Reversing the a

> You can’t extract someone’s fingerprint from a gym’s fingerprint scanning system and run it through a background check database, for example. Reversing the algorithm in order to generate a plausible fingerprint from the features stored by the scanner seems much simpler than cracking a secure hash function, since the scanner algorithm has to deal with imprecise inputs. Whether the generated fingerprint would match the relevant record in the background check database depends on whether the features extracted by the scanner are sufficiently different from those used by the background check system, and I suspect that companies just reuse the same algorithms for both.