Smartphones, Biometrics, and a Brave New World

The use of biometrics to identify people goes back more than 130 years to the work of Alphonse Bertillon, an early pioneer from the French Police force who developed an anthropometric identification system for suspects in the 1880s. In popular fiction, Mark Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi, also in the 1880s, about how a murderer was identified using fingerprint identification.