Terri Krejci, 60, of Huntsville, Alabama, was working as a night manager at CVS in 2014 when she found out she had breast cancer. She had six months of chemotherapy and then surgery. Her medical team warned her she might lose her hair and would feel nauseous. She had no idea she could lose her fingerprints.
“It was right after my second round of chemo, and I had a Samsung phone with Touch ID, and it kept saying ‘fingerprint not detected,’” says Krejci, who is now retired. “Then one of the nurses said, ‘Oh yeah, I think we forgot to tell you. That’s going to happen. ’ They said it might be quite a while before I saw those fingerprints again.”
This caused a particular problem, as Krejci needed to use fingerprint identification to enter the cancer unit. Someone had to let her into the facility each time, until they finally gave up and gave her the code. Ten years later, her hands are back to normal, she says, but she still has to reset the fingerprint scanner on her phone regularly.
Langenburg, the forensic scientist, says fingerprint problems aren’t going away any time soon. He predicts the trend will be to use multiple biometric factors to compensate for potential fingerprint problems — a retina scan or facial recognition. and A fingerprint, for example.
He says for people who know they have trouble with fingerprints (construction workers, climbers) there are ways to make your hands easier to read. Be sure to hydrate and use hand sanitizer or lotion right before scanning. In Minnesota and Wisconsin, fingerprinting professionals use “udder balm”, is normally used on cows, because it makes the fingers a little sticky and that helps to record the fingerprints.
Of course, there are some people who want “They often pay large sums of money to try to hide their fingerprints through acid, surgery or whatever,” he says. Thomas Buseyprofessor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, who studies the use of fingerprints and Accuracy of fingerprint analysis.
But Langenburg says going through such extensive procedures often has the opposite effect than intended, creating a more unique brand. He points to the American gangster John Dillingerwho cut off his fingers and then poured acid on them, which left scars on the middle part of the fingers but left all the tips, joints and sides identifiable. “As soon as we see those kinds of red flags, we immediately know that this person is trying to hide their identity. It’s nonsense that’s been going on for 100 years and it doesn’t work,” Langenburg says.
Busey thinks it’s odd that we’ve ended up focusing on using fingerprints for biometric identification. Fingerprinting for a crime typically involves recording all ten fingers, plus the palms, which allows for a wealth of detail, whereas a scanner on a phone, computer or at an airport might use just one finger, or just one area of that finger. It’s a very limited identifier in case something goes wrong, and also something that can be circumvented.
“You probably have a password for your computer and you’re not in the habit of sharing it with other people,” Busey says. “But when your fingerprint is your password, you’re literally leaving your password on every object you touch.”