are already experimenting with field devices that can extract biometric data from fingerprints. Some law enforcement agencies in the U.K. “Oftentimes police will deploy these technologies without any consultation with the public,” said Camilla Graham Wood, a legal officer at Privacy International, a London-based organization that advocates for greater human rights around emerging technologies. And even within the criminal justice system, some stakeholders worry that the emergence of these new fingerprint technologies could undermine what are already tenuous human rights. More pointedly, the ability to glean detailed information about a person by a mere fingerprint - Do they smoke cigarettes? Use marijuana? Enjoy fatty foods? Drink alcohol? - raises a number of potentially knotty questions of privacy and consent. For all of its heady new potential, however, the emergence of technologies like these has some observers feeling a bit uncomfortable about how, where, and to whom they are likely to be applied. Needless to say, the technology has titillated law enforcement and corrections officials, and it may have useful applications for professionals working in drug treatment, elder care centers, and other inpatient and outpatient facilities. The test can be modified to detect therapeutic drugs prescribed by physicians too. The researchers say they hope to expand the range of controlled substances that can be detected, which could include methamphetamines, amphetamines, and marijuana. The assay - which was so sensitive that it could still detect trace amounts of cocaine after subjects washed their hands with soap - correctly identified 99 percent of the users, and gave false positive results for just 2.5 percent of the non-users, according to the paper published in Clinical Chemistry. The team collected 160 fingerprint samples from 16 individuals at a drug treatment center who had used cocaine within the past 24 hours - confirmed by saliva testing - along with 80 samples from non-users. One novel, non-invasive forensic technique developed by researchers at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom can detect cocaine and opiate use from a fingerprint in as little as 30 seconds. And those trace chemicals can quickly reveal whether you have ingested cocaine, opiates, marijuana, or other drugs. The new methods use biometrics to analyze biochemical traces in sweat found along the ridges of a fingerprint. That’s right: The new techniques can determine, from a single fingerprint, not whether you have handled these drugs, but whether you have taken them.ĬONVICTIONS: Where science & criminal justice meet. A raft of sensitive new fingerprint analysis techniques are proving to be a potentially powerful, and in some cases, worrying new avenue for extracting intimate personal information - including what drugs a person has used. More recently, fingerprint verification technology has become almost ubiquitous in our daily lives as an access key for everything from smartphones and computers to bank accounts, offices, and even health records.įor all its utility, however, the image of this distinctive, swirling pattern has been the most information that you could extract from a fingerprint - though that’s starting to change. The loops, whorls, and arches that emerge from the “friction ridges” that form on a fetus’ developing fingers become unique to each person, and it’s no surprise that fingerprint identification has also been the gold standard in law enforcement and forensics since about the early 1900s. Artifacts unearthed from ancient Babylon, China, and Persia show that fingerprints were often used on clay tablets and seals for business transactions and official documents. F ingerprints are the oldest and most widely used biometric marker.
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