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Banks, Stores Using Thumbprinting (The following article is reprinted from the internet, AP--NY--04--21--98 0140EDT. Thanks to Steve Tillmann, LASD for the submission.)
By KALPANA SRINIVASAN WASHINGTON (AP) -- The next time a bank teller, grocery store checker or even a rental agent asks you to press firmly on the dotted line, they may be talking about your thumb. Once the messy hallmark of a visit to the police station, thumbprinting has caught on among companies as a way to track down customers who write bad checks or who don't return rented equipment. Businesses tout the system as a strong deterrent for criminals, who already have their fingerprints on file for prior convictions. ``It takes just a second,'' said Julie Davis of Nations Bank, which began thumbprinting in February. Nations Bank, like other banks, requires thumbprinting only for non--account--holders cashing checks. ``All the information we've seen has been so compelling that we couldn't find a reason not to do it,'' Davis said. But California businessman Peter Taussig finds the practice so insulting to consumers that he filed suit in small claims court against a bank that asked him for prints to cash a store refund check. ``I was not going to give them fingerprints nor was I going to give a saliva sample or a hair sample or a urine sample,'' said Taussig, who lives in Berkeley. The small claims judge dismissed the case because it was out of his jurisdiction, but Taussig plans to take the matter to his county's superior court. Banks in all 50 states have some version of the system and have led industries in using it. If a check is dishonored, then the bank hands it over to authorities, who can match the prints with those stored in a database of criminals. The Federal Reserve Board estimates that banks lost $615 million in fraudulent checks in 1995, with more than 529,000 bad checks written. ``Using thumbprinting is a tremendous deterrent from having criminals cashing in benefits checks,'' says John Hall, spokesman for the American Bankers Association. Banks are not alone. Identicator Inc., a San Bruno, Calif., company that manufactures the ink pad, sells its products to rental agencies, liquor stores and even pawnbrokers. ``This is not a matter of identification, it's a matter of verification,'' says the company's vice president, [and long time SCAFO member] Robert Loew. These ink pads differ from the days of old. They leave a black mark on the check but not on the fingers. Customers can rub off the remaining residue easily. Another system works like a Polaroid: Users press their thumb on an inkless pad and then on a treated sticker. A blue print develops on the adhesive, which can be pasted onto the back of documents. But John Young, a customer service representative from San Diego, wasn't worried about ink on his fingers when he was printed for writing a check at his local grocer last year. ``I found it humiliating because the perception was that I was criminal before I had committed any criminal activity,'' said Young, who had shopped at the store for 12 years. ``That's a slap in good people's faces.'' Young also felt his neighborhood was targeted for the policy since it wasn't implemented at all stores in the grocery chain. Privacy and consumer groups have attacked the policy, saying there is no guarantee the prints couldn't end up in the wrong hands and be copied as they travel from the store to the bank and, in some cases, back to the customer. Some also fear that prints on checks and other documents could encourage creation of a centralized database of all citizens. ``We want to prevent the development of the big database in the sky with everyone's fingerprints in it,'' said Beth Givens of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a consumer advocacy group in San Diego. Financial institutions and other companies maintain that the fingerprints are useless without the databases, which only authorities should have. ``We do not keep a database of prints, and we have talked with federal authorities who have assured us that the risk is very, very minimal,'' Davis said. ``You would need very, highly sophisticated equipment to begin to reproduce a print, to use it for anything.''
This article was printed in “THE PRINT” |