fingerprinted

Fingerprinted refers to the act or result of obtaining fingerprints for identification. In traditional forensics and civil administration, fingerprints are recorded using ink and paper or digital live-scan devices. Fingerprints consist of unique patterns of ridges on the fingertips and are analyzed for characteristic minutiae points. They are archived in biometric databases and can be compared with latent prints recovered from crime scenes or with records linked to a person’s identity using automated fingerprint identification systems (AFIS).

In digital contexts, fingerprinting describes techniques that aim to identify a device or user by collecting a combination of observable attributes. This device or browser fingerprint may include the user agent, IP address, time zone, screen resolution, installed fonts, plugins, and behavior-based signals such as canvas or audio data. The resulting fingerprint can be used for fraud prevention, user authentication, personalization, or tracking. Privacy concerns arise because fingerprinting can be difficult to detect and can persist across sessions, even when cookies are cleared. Mitigations include privacy-focused browsers or extensions, anti-fingerprinting technology, limiting data exposed by the device, or user consent under applicable data protection laws.

The term can also appear in law enforcement contexts: once a person is fingerprinted, the resulting prints are entered into criminal history records and may be compared against AFIS or similar databases to identify matches with suspects, arrestees, or prior offenders. The technique is valued for its high reliability when prints are of good quality but requires careful collection and interpretation.