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Denise Howell Can a person refuse to be fingerprinted by law enforcement?


G+_George Kozi
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Denise Howell Can a person refuse to be fingerprinted by law enforcement? If the answer is yes, then let's play Hypothetical.

 

John refuses to be fingerprinted. The police has a warrant for his phone. His phone has a fingerprint reader on it, and contains the data for one of his fingerprints. Does the police have now access to that fingerprint, and use it in their case against John?

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Interesting subject. Seems to me access to the phone would have to first be gained.So far access to a locked phone is difficult. Requires warrant, if I am up to date on all the current rulings. Having said that, Apple has said cloud information is available to law enforcement. Would that contain fingerprints?

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Can you legally or technically refuse to be fingerprinted in the first place? I think in most (all?) legal jurisdiction that I am aware of, once you are arrested, the police don't have to have your consent to take your fingerprint. Taking your mugshot and fingerprint is part of the arrest process rather than the legal process, so the only real chance to refuse getting fingerprinted is before arrest. Also, technically it's not very difficult to take fingerprint without consent. If I can just give you a glass of water, I'll have a good enough image of your fingerprint.

 

In any case, AFAIK in most fingerprint readers as used in mobile devices for authentication, the fingerprint is stored in a form that cannot be converted back to a fingerprint image. So the police (or anyone, really) cannot really obtain the stored fingerprint from the mobile phone, though it may be possible to use the stored data to match an existing, known fingerprint.

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