What is fingerprinting technology and how does it work?
Fingerprinting is the acquisition and storage of the image of a fingerprint. The FBI has been collecting fingerprint cards since 1924. More advanced optical or non-contact fingerprinting systems usually use prints from several fingers and are now the standard. Finger-scan technology also acquires the fingerprint, but does not store the full image, it does not use ink of any kind. For security reasons, the fingerprint itself is not stored. Instead a template of the fingerprint, which describes some of the key features and their locations of the fingerprint, is stored. The reason we take more than one impression of each finger is to create an exact template, which is much safer than storing an actual image of the fingerprint. This method ensures that the image cannot be synthesized from the template data.
