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charon writes:

Researchers in California have discovered that the traces our skin leaves behind on everything we touch can give them an amazing amount of information about our lives, habits, and well-being. Dr. Pieter Dorrestein and his team at the UC San Diego School of Medicine and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences performed a study which focused on phones, and are already working on another with other personal objects:

"By analyzing the molecules they've left behind on their phones, we could tell if a person is likely female, uses high-end cosmetics, dyes her hair, drinks coffee, prefers beer over wine, likes spicy food, is being treated for depression, wears sunscreen and bug spray -- and therefore likely spends a lot of time outdoors -- all kinds of things," said first author Amina Bouslimani, PhD, an assistant project scientist in Dorrestein's lab. "This is the kind of information that could help an investigator narrow down the search for an object's owner."

There are limitations, Dorrestein said. First of all, these molecular read-outs provide a general profile of person's lifestyle, but they are not meant to be a one-to-one match, like a fingerprint. To develop more precise profiles and for this method to be more useful, he said more molecules are needed in the reference database, particularly for the most common foods people eat, clothing materials, carpets, wall paints and anything else people come into contact with. He'd like to see a trace molecule database on the scale of the fingerprint database, but it's a large-scale effort that no single lab will be able to do alone.

No doubt such a database will be built by law enforcement agencies allowing them to trace your movements without your assistance.

Lifestyle chemistries from phones for individual profiling (open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1610019113) (DX)

Original Submission