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Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

Your fingerprints are largely static according to all police forces. To me that implies that the skin on your fingers probably wrinkles in a largely constant way too when submerged in water. No evidence nor research done here - just fiat!

If this is new then CSI will probably have a new tool. I suggest investigating other areas of the body to see if the same holds.

Do we have toe prints? ... and does the wrinkling thing hold for toes?

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And plenty of research has shown the police are wrong and fingerprints aren't super unique or static, that is just convenient for prosecuting cases. They are unique and static enough to differentiate between a handful of people you already have on a short suspect list in a shortish time frame usually, but once you start trying to sort populations by fingerprints or you find a random fingerprint and are trying to find some unknown person you don't know about, it falls apart and has fucked over a number innocent people.

Its like matching the make of a vehicle and their tire tracks. Yeah if you have someone you suspect, and you see he has the same tires and model of car as was reported, it likely is useful. But if you just try to blame the first person you find with the same model vehicle and the same tires despite the lack of other evidence, you are inevitably going to screw over some random innocent person. Fingerprints are less unique than someones face, and plenty of people have been thrown in jail because they merely looked like a suspect.

You can also lose your fingerprints the older you get. My mother in law is 65 and she has essentially no fingerprints (she used to have when younger though).

I believe loss of collagen also makes iPhone and Android and laptop fingerprint scanners perform much less reliably. I have no idea how border security scanners cope. I've noticed with seniors I help with digital life how they prefer face ID or pin, the fingerprint readers never seem to them to be as reliable.

Can confirm. Did a bunch of concrete work last summer, which ended up getting concrete inside my work gloves. Had to use passwords/windows hello all last summer.

> I have no idea how border security scanners cope.

They don't, cue Immigration officials being frustrated with seniors who are debarking after an international flight with a queue forming behind them....

https://www.ifsecglobal.com/access-control/why-age-is-not-ju...

Reminder that fingerprint forensics aren't nearly as infallible as people have been convinced they are and are based on an examiners opinion on a match.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32990979/

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