Terri Krejci, 60, of Huntsville, Alabama, was working as a night manager at CVS in 2014 when she learned she had breast cancer. She underwent six months of chemotherapy, then surgery. Her medical team warned her she might lose her hair, that she would be nauseous. She had no idea she might lose her fingerprints.
“It was right after my second round of chemotherapy, 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. It’s going to happen.’ They said it might be a long time before I see those fingerprints again.”
That created a particular problem—Krejci had to operate her fingerprint ID to get into the oncology ward. Someone had to let her in every time until they finally gave in and gave her a code. Ten years later, her hands are back to normal, she says, but she still has to regularly reset the fingerprint scan on her phone.
Langenburg, the forensic scientist, says the problems with fingerprints aren’t going away anytime soon. He predicts the trend will be to operate multiple biometrics to compensate for potential fingerprint problems — retinal scanning or facial identification AND for example, a fingerprint.
For people who know they have trouble with fingerprints — construction workers, rock climbers — there are ways to make your handprints easier to read, he says. Stay hydrated and operate hand sanitizer or lotion right before you get scanned. In Minnesota and Wisconsin, fingerprinters operate “udder balm”, typically used on cows as it makes the fingers slightly sticky, making fingerprinting easier.
Of course, there are people who to want their fingerprints have been masked — especially criminals. “They often pay large sums of money to try to mask their fingerprints with acid or surgery or something else,” he says Thomas Buseyprofessor of psychology and brain sciences at Indiana University who studies the operate of fingerprints and fingerprint analysis accuracy.
But Langenburg says going through these extensive procedures often backfires, creating a more unique mark. He points to the American gangster John Dillingerwho cut his fingers and then poured acid into them, which left scars in the middle of the fingers but left all the tips, joints and sides identifiable. “As soon as we see red flags like that, we know this person is trying to hide their identity. It’s the kind of bullshit that’s been going on for 100 years and it’s not working,” Langenburg says.
Busey says it’s odd that we’ve focused on using fingerprints for biometric identification. A criminal’s fingerprints typically involve capturing all 10 fingers as well as the palm, capturing a huge amount of detail, whereas something like a phone, computer or airport scanner might only operate one finger, or just an area on that finger. It’s a very constrained identifier if something goes wrong — and something that spreads.
“You probably have a password for your computer, and you probably don’t share it with other people,” Busey says. “But when your fingerprint is your password, you literally leave it on every object you touch.”