7 ms·

There's a television ad that stands out in my memory from when I was a kid (80s). The camera pans across patrons at a diner and the voiceover is about how a kid

There's a television ad that stands out in my memory from when I was a kid (80s). The camera pans across patrons at a diner and the voiceover is about how a kidnapped child was recovered as the camera stops on a young girl (~8yo). The child is described, but the child the camera landed on has different features (hair dyed, cut, whatever). The explanation for how she was identified is that her fingerprints were on file. The message? Get your children fingerprinted! In adulthood, I've often thought back to that ludicrous ad. No child's fingerprints are getting checked unless some foul play is already suspected. The likelihood that the child would fall into police custody and get checked is already slim; fingerprints aren't going to help until that happens. We don't have campaigns to fingerprint children as a proactive precaution today (of which I'm aware). Clearly, that wasn't a major breakthrough in reuniting kidnapped children with their parents that endured. I'm very cynical, but I've always thought that was a campaign to gather biometrics from the population using fear as a motivator. I don't necessarily think this is that, but I can't help wondering the perverse incentives of the FBI as I'm reminded of the ad.

Silica6149 4y ago
If it was a ad, was a company involved? Sending biometrics to any company should always make someone think twice.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
rbanffy 4y ago
> No child's fingerprints are getting checked unless some foul play is already suspected. A simple way around it is to have the kid fingerprinted and only release the information if the kid needs to be tracked/located.
- GavinMcG 4y ago
  I think the comment is pointing out that if your child is kidnapped and raised elsewhere, there will not be a reason to fingerprint them then for comparison unless there's already a reason to think they may have been kidnapped. That is, it might help on the back end, but the comment is suggesting that mass fingerprinting is not likely to move the needle much.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    A small chance is better than no chance. I was answering to the privacy concern, not the effectiveness of the method. It seems like a plausible business model to professionally collect hold biometric data encrypted with the owner's keys, opaque to the party storing the data. It's a bit like the businesses that store umbilical cord stem cells for the very unlikely chance they'll be useful at some point in the future.
    - GavinMcG 4y ago
      Got it. I had thought you were responding to the part you quoted.
      - rbanffy 4y ago
        That's a very good point. Sorry for the confusion.
- vanattab 4y ago
  I think thier point was even if you registered your kids fingerprints with the police they are not going to go around to every kid in all the dinners checking fingerprints to compare to.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    My point was to only release the information to the police if and when the kid needs to be located.
    - bobkazamakis 4y ago
      release what valuable information here? What information is being "released" that is going to be helpful in a way that if it wasn't for the FBI App, you would be regretting it?
      - rbanffy 4y ago
        My suggestion was to have the information with you, and release it to the police if and when privacy concerns are not as relevant in comparison.
trey-jones 4y ago
This was a very big thing in the late 80s apparently. Our local Kiwanis Club had provided IDs for parents in the community who wanted them. They just had a photo of the child with some other physical descriptions like eye color and birthmarks. Still, kind of a local, analog version of this, but without the dystopian bent. I agree, this feels more creepy than useful/helpful service.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  There was a moral panic about kidnapped children in the '80s that resulted in parents getting their kids fingerprinted. The macabre side of it is that it wasn't for reuniting living kids... Very many children who can talk (i.e. 8 years old) would be able to describe their parents to the cops well enough to track them down from phone book data. It was really useful data for identifying John and Jane Doe corpses though.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Tade0 4y ago
Fingerprints aren't even particularly useful here. Our irises are considerably more information-dense, accessible and stable over time as evidenced by the famous identification of Sharbat Gula: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jgd1000/afghan.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jgd1000/afghan.html A close-up photo should be enough to reliably identify a person years after they went missing.
- shapefrog 4y ago
  > Our irises are considerably more information-dense Someone should give you free cryptocurrency for a scan of your iris.
  - hugodutka 4y ago
    It’s already been done: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/10/21/sam-altmans-worldcoin-wants-to-scan-your-eyes-in-exchange-for-crypto.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/10/21/sam-altmans-worldcoin-wa...
    - JadoJodo 4y ago
      I suspect GP was being facetious.
      - klyrs 4y ago
        Poe's law strikes again. Any joke about crypto scams has already been implemented for real...
    - kelseyfrog 4y ago
      As someone who wants to enter and profit from the burgeoning underground iris transplantation economy, where do I start? I get the sense that there is an arbitrage opportunity between the cost of eye surgery and crypto returns but exactly how do I capitalize on this?
    - sblom 4y ago
      (That was the joke.)
JTbane 4y ago
Yep, I remember getting fingerprinted at a mall. Thanks to my folks for preemptively snitching.
- AndyMcConachie 4y ago
  Happened to me as well. Now the FBI has my fingerprints on file even though I've never committed a crime. I had a discussion with my Mom a couple years about this and she admitted she screwed up. I can't blame her of course. Especially since at the time there was plenty of FBI propoganda about missing kids terrifying parents and claiming this was a solution.
  - mc32 4y ago
    I think most states [edit: apparently only some states] in the US require a fingerprint in order to issue a drivers' license or for a state ID. So I guess you could be somewhat anonymous till you had to get your state ID and then they'd know who it was.
    - twunde 4y ago
      Well this sent me down a tangent since I had never heard of this. Per https://www.cga.ct.gov/2001/rpt/2001-R-0858.htm https://www.cga.ct.gov/2001/rpt/2001-R-0858.htm (circa 2001) the only states that require a fingerprint are California, Colorado, Georgia, Texas although apparently Alabama and Florida used to do so. Feels pretty crazy to me
      - BrianGragg 4y ago
        Oklahoma requires a thumbprint. Electronically.
    - toast0 4y ago
      IIRC, California just takes a thumbprint, so obviously don't use that thumb while committing crimes and you're fine. OTOH, I got the full set of fingerprints (in ink!) and affirmed an oath to uphold the constitutions of the US and California as a condition of working for a school district, so I'm not available for crimes anymore.
red_phone 4y ago
I remember that as well. Just assumed that the unstated reason was to assist in identifying deceased kids.
300bps 4y ago
My parents were paranoid about kidnappings. It was like perfect social engineering on my parents' generation with TV movies like Adam - the story of John Walsh's son who was kidnapped and beheaded: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085136/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085136/ My parents had me and my siblings watch that movie with them - it is still unsettling to me thinking about it. And then the FBI contacted my school and provided a voluntary program for parents to have their children fingerprinted. From my memory 95%+ of kids all lined up in my school and got fingerprinted to "protect them from kidnapping". It honestly seems surreal - looking back it sure seems like a black ops campaign to get biometric data on a large portion of the U.S. youth population.
- azinman2 4y ago
  Or, they actually were thought to be useful for kidnappings and this was an honest attempt. Perhaps largely security theatre, I could imagine there have been a handful of cases where this was enough. The ever growing mistrust in government and society will become a self fulfilling promise. I worry about our future when no good and honest talent wants to work for the greater good at reduced pay.
  - samatman 4y ago
    There is abundant evidence suggesting that arrow of causality between FBI activity and public perception of them as dastardly flows in the opposite direction from the one you have presumed here.
gonzo41 4y ago
I got bonded (Police background checks with fingerprinting etc) for a job which had a large cash handling component. dealing with > 100K in twenties and fifties in a Casino. My prints were kept for elimination after the process, but the police were very eager to inform me that they don't get kept past two years. The police had petitioned the government under the guise of privacy laws to make sure they had to throw away the records. Which seems counter intuitive until you realize it'd require me to go through the same process again at a later date. More money for them. I've less fear of my biometrics being tracked than I do of rent seeking behavior from public officials.
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
  It also means they don't have to deal with the problem of having shit tons of fingerprint data. Depending on the laws around who was responsible for it, that could be quite a hassle.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  For those of us with an inverted threat model, the profit motive here seems an interesting approach.
thayne 4y ago
I'm not sure that's relevant to this. This app just makes it easier to give police or security the information they ask for if you lose your child (note not necessarily kidnapped), like a photo, age, and height. And they claim the info is only stored locally. Maybe that claim is false, but if it was, then once that was discovered it would probably cause a lot of legal and PR problems for the FBI.
Markoff 4y ago
no need for any campaign anymore, most kids in EU have biometric passports, though not sure at what age they start fingerprinting them, which they don't do because their hands are growing too much so fingerprints world be quite useless under certain age though some countries like Germany issue some simplified passports for kids, Czechia and Slovakia for instance issue same as adult passports, only difference being validity
libraryatnight 4y ago
I remember this! I got finger printed at some event where police had a booth next to the fire dept (who were espousing bike helmets and teaching kids how to properly wear one etc, actually useful safety info). It wasn't until I was a teenager when my first car was broken into and the speakers stolen that I realized how useless that endeavor must be. The officer who responded (my first time calling the police, not running from them!) was pretty upfront with me. As he took finger prints from the area where the door was jimmied, I was like "cool, finger printing!" and he told me this wouldn't likely lead to anything. First he said "You'll never get your speakers back, even if we found them we wouldn't call you, they'd probably be in a lot of all kinds of other stolen stuff and it's impossible to sort through and return stolen items." Bummer number one. Then he explained that the finger prints would only be useful if the thief got picked up for doing something else, he wasn't going to go run the prints and try to find the person etc like I was probably imagining (I was, I admit, thinking that's what happened when they took finger prints - thanks TV). Standing in my driveway I flashed back immediately to that finger printing booth where my parents were told it would help if I got kidnapped, and thought "Oh great, I'm in the system." Not that I had a life of crime in mind, but the internet of the early 90s really gave me a healthy distrust of being tracked, logged, etc. (Oh if we only knew the hellscape ahead.)
- xen2xen1 4y ago
  I suspect running fingerprints is much easier now, depending on how long it's been. It's very automated now.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  There's a science-fiction short story I've been trying to remember for quite some time. I'd all but certainly read it in an anthology during the 1970s or early 1980s, probably one of the award compilations (Hugos, Analog, etc.). A computer programmer and his boss are working on a large data tracking system that is about to be activated, in which everyone's identification and personal information are entered. The boss gives the programmer the choice of opting out of the system. The programmer opts out. For the life of me I cannot remember the rest of the story, the author, year, etc. But it's stuck with me, and comes to mind often as a slew of ever-more-invasive online information systems (ISP email, some early LinkedIn-type start-ups, MySpace and Facebook, Google Gmail, Google+, etc.) have come on to the scene. If anyone can remember what story this was, or others reasonably similar to it, I'd be grateful.
m463 4y ago
A friend of mine noticed that the cameras at the bart stations were extremely hi-res a few years ago. He thought they could probably capture fingerprints with them. I wonder what kinds of drive-by biometrics are really collected, especially when protecting children.

Silica6149 4y ago

If it was a ad, was a company involved? Sending biometrics to any company should always make someone think twice.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

rbanffy 4y ago

> No child's fingerprints are getting checked unless some foul play is already suspected. A simple way around it is to have the kid fingerprinted and only release the information if the kid needs to be tracked/located.

GavinMcG 4y ago
I think the comment is pointing out that if your child is kidnapped and raised elsewhere, there will not be a reason to fingerprint them then for comparison unless there's already a reason to think they may have been kidnapped. That is, it might help on the back end, but the comment is suggesting that mass fingerprinting is not likely to move the needle much.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  A small chance is better than no chance. I was answering to the privacy concern, not the effectiveness of the method. It seems like a plausible business model to professionally collect hold biometric data encrypted with the owner's keys, opaque to the party storing the data. It's a bit like the businesses that store umbilical cord stem cells for the very unlikely chance they'll be useful at some point in the future.
  - GavinMcG 4y ago
    Got it. I had thought you were responding to the part you quoted.
    - rbanffy 4y ago
      That's a very good point. Sorry for the confusion.
vanattab 4y ago
I think thier point was even if you registered your kids fingerprints with the police they are not going to go around to every kid in all the dinners checking fingerprints to compare to.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  My point was to only release the information to the police if and when the kid needs to be located.
  - bobkazamakis 4y ago
    release what valuable information here? What information is being "released" that is going to be helpful in a way that if it wasn't for the FBI App, you would be regretting it?
    - rbanffy 4y ago
      My suggestion was to have the information with you, and release it to the police if and when privacy concerns are not as relevant in comparison.

trey-jones 4y ago

This was a very big thing in the late 80s apparently. Our local Kiwanis Club had provided IDs for parents in the community who wanted them. They just had a photo of the child with some other physical descriptions like eye color and birthmarks. Still, kind of a local, analog version of this, but without the dystopian bent. I agree, this feels more creepy than useful/helpful service.

shadowgovt 4y ago
There was a moral panic about kidnapped children in the '80s that resulted in parents getting their kids fingerprinted. The macabre side of it is that it wasn't for reuniting living kids... Very many children who can talk (i.e. 8 years old) would be able to describe their parents to the cops well enough to track them down from phone book data. It was really useful data for identifying John and Jane Doe corpses though.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Tade0 4y ago

Fingerprints aren't even particularly useful here. Our irises are considerably more information-dense, accessible and stable over time as evidenced by the famous identification of Sharbat Gula: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jgd1000/afghan.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jgd1000/afghan.html A close-up photo should be enough to reliably identify a person years after they went missing.

shapefrog 4y ago
> Our irises are considerably more information-dense Someone should give you free cryptocurrency for a scan of your iris.
- hugodutka 4y ago
  It’s already been done: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/10/21/sam-altmans-worldcoin-wants-to-scan-your-eyes-in-exchange-for-crypto.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/10/21/sam-altmans-worldcoin-wa...
  - JadoJodo 4y ago
    I suspect GP was being facetious.
    - klyrs 4y ago
      Poe's law strikes again. Any joke about crypto scams has already been implemented for real...
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    As someone who wants to enter and profit from the burgeoning underground iris transplantation economy, where do I start? I get the sense that there is an arbitrage opportunity between the cost of eye surgery and crypto returns but exactly how do I capitalize on this?
  - sblom 4y ago
    (That was the joke.)

JTbane 4y ago

Yep, I remember getting fingerprinted at a mall. Thanks to my folks for preemptively snitching.

AndyMcConachie 4y ago
Happened to me as well. Now the FBI has my fingerprints on file even though I've never committed a crime. I had a discussion with my Mom a couple years about this and she admitted she screwed up. I can't blame her of course. Especially since at the time there was plenty of FBI propoganda about missing kids terrifying parents and claiming this was a solution.
- mc32 4y ago
  I think most states [edit: apparently only some states] in the US require a fingerprint in order to issue a drivers' license or for a state ID. So I guess you could be somewhat anonymous till you had to get your state ID and then they'd know who it was.
  - twunde 4y ago
    Well this sent me down a tangent since I had never heard of this. Per https://www.cga.ct.gov/2001/rpt/2001-R-0858.htm https://www.cga.ct.gov/2001/rpt/2001-R-0858.htm (circa 2001) the only states that require a fingerprint are California, Colorado, Georgia, Texas although apparently Alabama and Florida used to do so. Feels pretty crazy to me
    - BrianGragg 4y ago
      Oklahoma requires a thumbprint. Electronically.
  - toast0 4y ago
    IIRC, California just takes a thumbprint, so obviously don't use that thumb while committing crimes and you're fine. OTOH, I got the full set of fingerprints (in ink!) and affirmed an oath to uphold the constitutions of the US and California as a condition of working for a school district, so I'm not available for crimes anymore.

red_phone 4y ago

I remember that as well. Just assumed that the unstated reason was to assist in identifying deceased kids.

300bps 4y ago

My parents were paranoid about kidnappings. It was like perfect social engineering on my parents' generation with TV movies like Adam - the story of John Walsh's son who was kidnapped and beheaded: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085136/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085136/ My parents had me and my siblings watch that movie with them - it is still unsettling to me thinking about it. And then the FBI contacted my school and provided a voluntary program for parents to have their children fingerprinted. From my memory 95%+ of kids all lined up in my school and got fingerprinted to "protect them from kidnapping". It honestly seems surreal - looking back it sure seems like a black ops campaign to get biometric data on a large portion of the U.S. youth population.

azinman2 4y ago
Or, they actually were thought to be useful for kidnappings and this was an honest attempt. Perhaps largely security theatre, I could imagine there have been a handful of cases where this was enough. The ever growing mistrust in government and society will become a self fulfilling promise. I worry about our future when no good and honest talent wants to work for the greater good at reduced pay.
- samatman 4y ago
  There is abundant evidence suggesting that arrow of causality between FBI activity and public perception of them as dastardly flows in the opposite direction from the one you have presumed here.

gonzo41 4y ago

I got bonded (Police background checks with fingerprinting etc) for a job which had a large cash handling component. dealing with > 100K in twenties and fifties in a Casino. My prints were kept for elimination after the process, but the police were very eager to inform me that they don't get kept past two years. The police had petitioned the government under the guise of privacy laws to make sure they had to throw away the records. Which seems counter intuitive until you realize it'd require me to go through the same process again at a later date. More money for them. I've less fear of my biometrics being tracked than I do of rent seeking behavior from public officials.

lazyasciiart 4y ago
It also means they don't have to deal with the problem of having shit tons of fingerprint data. Depending on the laws around who was responsible for it, that could be quite a hassle.
dredmorbius 4y ago
For those of us with an inverted threat model, the profit motive here seems an interesting approach.

thayne 4y ago

I'm not sure that's relevant to this. This app just makes it easier to give police or security the information they ask for if you lose your child (note not necessarily kidnapped), like a photo, age, and height. And they claim the info is only stored locally. Maybe that claim is false, but if it was, then once that was discovered it would probably cause a lot of legal and PR problems for the FBI.

Markoff 4y ago

no need for any campaign anymore, most kids in EU have biometric passports, though not sure at what age they start fingerprinting them, which they don't do because their hands are growing too much so fingerprints world be quite useless under certain age though some countries like Germany issue some simplified passports for kids, Czechia and Slovakia for instance issue same as adult passports, only difference being validity

libraryatnight 4y ago

I remember this! I got finger printed at some event where police had a booth next to the fire dept (who were espousing bike helmets and teaching kids how to properly wear one etc, actually useful safety info). It wasn't until I was a teenager when my first car was broken into and the speakers stolen that I realized how useless that endeavor must be. The officer who responded (my first time calling the police, not running from them!) was pretty upfront with me. As he took finger prints from the area where the door was jimmied, I was like "cool, finger printing!" and he told me this wouldn't likely lead to anything. First he said "You'll never get your speakers back, even if we found them we wouldn't call you, they'd probably be in a lot of all kinds of other stolen stuff and it's impossible to sort through and return stolen items." Bummer number one. Then he explained that the finger prints would only be useful if the thief got picked up for doing something else, he wasn't going to go run the prints and try to find the person etc like I was probably imagining (I was, I admit, thinking that's what happened when they took finger prints - thanks TV). Standing in my driveway I flashed back immediately to that finger printing booth where my parents were told it would help if I got kidnapped, and thought "Oh great, I'm in the system." Not that I had a life of crime in mind, but the internet of the early 90s really gave me a healthy distrust of being tracked, logged, etc. (Oh if we only knew the hellscape ahead.)

xen2xen1 4y ago
I suspect running fingerprints is much easier now, depending on how long it's been. It's very automated now.
dredmorbius 4y ago
There's a science-fiction short story I've been trying to remember for quite some time. I'd all but certainly read it in an anthology during the 1970s or early 1980s, probably one of the award compilations (Hugos, Analog, etc.). A computer programmer and his boss are working on a large data tracking system that is about to be activated, in which everyone's identification and personal information are entered. The boss gives the programmer the choice of opting out of the system. The programmer opts out. For the life of me I cannot remember the rest of the story, the author, year, etc. But it's stuck with me, and comes to mind often as a slew of ever-more-invasive online information systems (ISP email, some early LinkedIn-type start-ups, MySpace and Facebook, Google Gmail, Google+, etc.) have come on to the scene. If anyone can remember what story this was, or others reasonably similar to it, I'd be grateful.

m463 4y ago

A friend of mine noticed that the cameras at the bart stations were extremely hi-res a few years ago. He thought they could probably capture fingerprints with them. I wonder what kinds of drive-by biometrics are really collected, especially when protecting children.