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In March, two detectives went to a funeral home and asked to see a body. The reason? They wanted to unlock the man's phone and needed his fingerprints, according to news reports. And though the detectives were granted access to the man's body, they couldn't unlock the phone.
The man, Linus Phillip, was shot and killed by a police officer outside a Wawa convenience store in Largo, Florida. Detectives were looking for information to help them investigate Phillip's death as well as information about a separate investigation involving drugs, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
What the detectives did is legal, as Forbesreported, but it certainly raises ethical questions. And given that the detectives were unsuccessful, it resurfaces a science question as well: Do you need to be alive for your fingertips to unlock your phone?
In fact, it gets more difficult to unlock a phone using fingertips the longer a person has been dead, said Anil Jain, a professor of computer science and engineering who has spent years working on fingerprint recognition at Michigan State University and one of the authors of the "Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition".
This is because, on most smartphones, fingerprint identification works through electrical conductance, Jain told Live Science. (▪ ▪ ▪)
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