From "Law and Order" to "CSI," not to mention real life, investigators have used fingerprints as the gold standard for linking criminals to a crime. But if a perpetrator leaves prints from different fingers in two different crime scenes, these scenes are very difficult to link, and the trace can go cold.
That is not at all what this article is about. The headline is terrible.
The research is suggesting that there may exist “per-person” fingerprint markers, whereas right now we only use “per-finger” markers. It’s suggesting that they could look at two different fingers, (left index and right pinky, for example) and say “these two fingerprints are from the same person”.
When they say “not unique”, they mean “there appear to be markers common to all fingerprints of the same person”
The truth is more interesting than the headline