But What are You Going to DO With My Fingerprints?

There's been a lot of concern floating around the internet this morning about the new requirement that home sellers in Cook County, Illinois provide a thumbprint. There are, of course, the obvious concerns that always arise when some governmental agency or other starts collecting even more personal data about citizens. We all know about that comprehensive database the FBI is building, and some of us get a little nervous when we notice some new data collection method.

But that's not what bothers me about the thumbprint requirement. What bothers me about the thumbprint requirement is the extreme unlikelihood that it's going to serve any purpose whatsoever. You see, fingerprints are only useful when we have something to compare them with. In a criminal case, fingerprints help in two ways. If you have a suspect, you can match the fingerprints from the evidence to find out whether or not they match your suspect. And if you don't have a suspect, you can run the fingerprints through various databases to find out whether they match anyone whose fingerprints are already on file.

The latter can be a slow process, and it doesn't always bear fruit. After all, most of us don't have our fingerprints on file anywhere. If you've been arrested, applied for certain professional licenses, been in the military, etc., your fingerprints are in some database somewhere. Even finding those is dicey without a full-scale effort, because most searches don't include all of these databases. There's a hierarchy of priorities, and in some cases a backlog.

So, let's imagine that every home seller in Cook County provides a thumbprint. The vast majority of those thumbprints serve no immediate purpose, because there's nothing to match them against. If a problem arises--if it turns out that a home has been sold fraudulently--they may serve a couple of purposes. First, they could help the actual homeowner prove that he wasn't the one who sold the house. That's good...except that when a home has been fraudulently transferred by a third party, this usually isn't much of an issue. The second way it could help is that IF the actual seller's fingerprints were in some database somewhere, and IF the appropriate law enforcement agency ran the thumbprint against the right database, the perpetrator could be identified and prosecuted. The FBI currently has fingerprints on file for about 20% of the U.S. population.

So, the big question in my mind isn't "Is this too much of a burden?" or "Is this a civil rights issue?" or "What kind of liability issues does this raise?" or "Is it really fair to charge homeowners for this?", though those are all valid questions. My big question is this: What's the point?

I haven't seen any reporting thus far that sets forth any practical way in which this measure will help reduce fraudulent transfers.