WHY SHOULD YOU BE WORRIED ABOUT IT?
Footprint and fingerprint analysis are highly subjective. Both rely on human experts to reach conclusions. Humans, even experts, are notoriously fallible. There are scores of examples of people who were wrongly convicted based on corrupted or mistaken fingerprint evidence. Fingerprints and footprints smudge, smear, and degrade quickly in weather. Crime scenes can be easily contaminated by careless police or ignorant bystanders.
You’ve heard the claim that every person’s fingerprints are unique, but no large-scale cross-referencing of fingerprints has ever been done. So when people claim every fingerprint is unique, they’re only saying that because no one has ever found two identical fingerprints. Of the sixty-five billion fingerprints in the world, how many have been compared? There could easily be millions of identical or nearly identical fingerprints, and no one would ever know. You could, quite conceivably, have the same fingerprints as Osama bin Laden.
Likewise, common shoe brands can render footprint evidence less than useful. Nike sells millions of pairs of Air Force 1s every year. In some urban crime scenes, it’s entirely feasible that similar or identical footprints made by perpetrators, victims, and totally uninvolved people could overlap. Imagine a crime scene at a sorority house—which pair of Ugg boots are you looking for?
On the flip side, some biometric identification technology can be easily defeated. Cheap fingerprint scanners can be defeated with super glue and a sheet of plastic foil. More expensive scanners can be hacked with false fingers made out of putty. Voice print identification systems can be spoofed with a high-fidelity recording. Face-recognition systems fall victim to high-resolution photographs. Retinal scanners are more secure than most systems, but they, too, can be defeated.
Biometric security is sexy because it’s new and appears high-tech, but in the long term, it is less secure than a good password. When a password system is defeated, all you need to do is change the password. When a fingerprint identification system is defeated, well, you only get nine more resets before you have to go through the uncomfortable and costly procedure of having your hands replaced.
As previously mentioned, there are few laws protecting your DNA from collection; you leave it lying around everywhere. An agency or individual committed to building a broad, specific database could easily do so simply by picking up coffee cups at a local Starbucks. The trace DNA left on a coffee cup isn’t going to be enough to sequence your genome, but it’s more than enough to build a DNA profile.
Proper storage of even trace samples could leave the possibility of generating a full sequence at a later date open. As techniques and computing power continue to improve, partial or full sequences could be generated even from damaged samples. And suddenly, the FBI could know much more about you—eye color, hair color, health, and ethnicity.
If insurance companies or employers begin demanding gene sequences, the potential for abuse is vast. Choosing whether to insure or hire individuals based on genetic predispositions smacks of racism and eugenics, but it is also a very real possibility. Within the next few years, we just might be able to point to genetic markers for unemployment and bankruptcy—they’ll be right next to the markers for alcoholism and cancer.