Ears Might Be Better Than Fingerprints For ID

An anonymous reader writes "A new study says that outer ear could be better unique identification mark in human beings than finger prints. 'When you're born your ear is fully formed. The lobe descends a little, but overall it stays the same. It's a great way to identify people,' said Mark Nixon, a computer scientist at the University of Southampton and leader of the research. Nixon and his team presented a paper at the IEEE Fourth International Conference on Biometrics and using an algorithm identified people with 99.6 per cent accuracy." An anonymous reader adds a link to Wired's story on the same conference presentation, which adds this skeptical note: "'I have seen no scientific proof that the ear doesn’t change significantly over time. People tend to believe notions like these, and they are repeated over time,' said Anil Jain, a computer scientist at Michigan State University who was not involved in the study. 'Fingerprinting has a history of 100 years showing that it works, unless you destroy your fingerprints or work in an industry that gives you calluses.'"

I beg to differ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever seen people with jewelry that stretches their ears in a significant ways? What about wrestlers? Some of these peoples ears bare little resemblance to what they did when born. Now granted people can burn their finger tips and do all kinds of other crap as well, but this kind of mutilation is usually intentional as compared to the examples above (yes... I know people can lose fingers to a saw too...)

Fingerprint destruction

[Xugumad]

> unless you destroy your fingerprints

Having inadvertantly taken my fingerprints off one hand at one point (yes, it was VERY painful, thank you), and found (as many others have) that they grow back... can you actually damage them so bad/repeatedly they don't grow back, and still have things like, erm, fingertips?

Re:100 year history showing that it works?

[sampas]

Actually, no, you can't depend on fingerprints for identification in many crime cases. Anyone who's read Ross Anderson's Security Engineering book is familiar with a number of cases in which police said fingerprints are a match when they are not. When police say fingerprints match, it's often only a four or five-point match, which really isn't a match at all. Other departments require an eight-point match or greater. What's a "match" in one jurisdiction isn't even close in another. No one's ever proven that two people don't have the same fingerprints, either. Likewise, investigators also say the MD5 hash of a file is its "fingerprint" without ever informing jury of how many collisions there are with MD5 or the algorithm's obsolescence.

Re:100 year history showing that it works?

[blindseer]

I've had my fingerprints taken several times in my life. The first time I was in grade school and everyone in class was marched into the "music room" (just another classroom but this one had grade school equivalents of real musical instruments) only to be met by two people in uniform and were were fingerprinted without really telling us why. I found out later that the sheriff was dong this, he was giving the parents the fingerprint cards supposedly as a measure to identify children that were abducted. Years after that I found out that fingerprints are rarely used in identifying children as missing children are rarely found with viable fingerprints, such as in being dead. DNA tests did not exist then, but dental records did.

I was fingerprinted again for the Army. Again to get a concealed weapon permit. Both times the person taking my fingerprints were in uniform, acted professionally, and were very meticulous in taking the prints.

The last time I had my fingerprints taken was for a concealed weapon permit in another state. The class was held in what most people would consider a shack in a small town on a private club's shooting range. The instructor offered to take our fingerprints for no additional fee. He took fingerprint cards out of a folder, handed them to each of us, and instructed us in how to fill in the blanks on the top. He then produced an ink pad, much like one would see used by a librarian to wet the little stamp to mark the check out date, and told us how to make a clear impression on the cards. He then filled out his own contact information on the forms. While we were doing this I started to ask what kind of training he had in taking fingerprints. None. I asked what kind of authority he carried in taking fingerprints. None. He was wearing a sheriff shirt or cap that indicated he worked for a local county sheriff but when I asked what he did there he was very vague. He could have been a deputy, a trainer of some sort, a jailor, or just some paper pusher. It appears my fingerprints were all OK since I got my permit.

That conversation held in a Midwestern shack destroyed the illusion I had on the validity of fingerprinting as a crime prevention or crime solving tool. To further erode the confidence I have in fingerprinting I was asking some questions about another concealed weapon permit. (To those that have been keeping count, yes, this is my third application for a concealed weapons permit. This is necessary since so few states will recognize permits from another state.) The sheriff was charging only $15 to process the permit and only $10 to process the fingerprints. That did not add up since the other states were charging considerably more than that. I came to the conclusion that the sheriff was not submitting the fingerprints to the FBI like the other states did. The FBI charges something like $30 to process fingerprints. There is no way the sheriff is going to be taking general funds to process fingerprints for concealed weapon permits. This county sheriff office made the newspapers for how much in the hole his budget was running, which probably led to getting a new sheriff. The fingerprints cost next to nothing for him to take and shove in a drawer while at the same time getting $10 from each person wanting to carry a concealed firearm.

I was in awe on how this all must work. On TV and in movies they show people in white coats comparing images with large computers in impressive stone buildings. Nope, it's dudes in ball caps and blue jeans in a shack out by a corn field looking at fingerprints with a magnifying glass and a keychain light.