Proposal of non-invasive fingerprint age determination to improve data privacy management in police work from a legal perspective using the example of Germany

Abstract

Innovation in sensors and pattern recognition technologies impacts on our society. Recent improvements in capturing techniques allow for the application of high-resolution contactless image sensors to the lifting of latent fingerprints, potentially replacing classical contact based techniques such as powdering and sticky tape lifting in the future. This technology might help police authorities to identify criminals, but it also poses privacy concerns due to its ability to capture large amounts of fingerprints. Therefore, one has to give special consideration to data privacy management. One way of promoting data privacy could be to determine the age of fingerprints in advance and to not capture fingerprints left at times irrelevant for a crime. Another way could be to determine the age of fingerprints in parallel to the investigation and securely delete fingerprint data as soon as it is found to be of age different to the crime. To this end, we explore the possible future technology of fingerprint age determination and its use for data privacy protection in a repressive application scenario at the crime scene as well as a preventive one at the airport. This will be analyzed from a technical-legal point of view in order to promote legal criteria of the German and European privacy and data protection laws. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.