Does fingerprint change over time?

Why do I need to get fingerprints when I work as an ID card? Will fingerprints change over time? Fingerprints and finger lines determine the fate of each person or not ?

Can fingerprints change?

Fingerprints have long been used by security agencies as a legal basis for identity identification, based on proven characteristics (by statistical means): each person's fingerprints are unique, is invariant over time. What if the scientific community discovered that each person's fingerprints could change over time (without having to suffer serious environmental impacts) ?.

Both on film and in real life, fingerprints are often regarded as a basis for criminal crimes. Many studies have demonstrated that loops, hand flowers (spiral lines) on exposed skin are personal marks of each person, reliable enough to be evidence. However, a few people have also tried to verify whether they really did not change over time.

Research indicates that fingerprints really change , but very little. A statistical analysis published on " Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences " said fingerprints have changed over time, but the change is minimal, not enough to affect legal analysis.

The study was conducted on 15 597 subjects, these samples were collected at least 5 times over a minimum period of 5 years [1]. The results show that the longer the samples are taken, the smaller the overlap between them will be [2].

However, a scenario in which an innocent defendant is wrongly sentenced, because people find (by machine analysis) the fingerprint match, which is very low, with an almost zero probability, immediately even when you compare fingerprint samples taken at any two times.

In general, the results of this study depend on the quality of fingerprint images. A poor quality image will lead to many deviations, leading the research team to conclude that image quality plays a big role in explaining fingerprint changes over time.