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posted by takyon on Monday November 21 2016, @08:03PM   Printer-friendly

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)


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  • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday November 22 2016, @01:33AM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Tuesday November 22 2016, @01:33AM (#430972) Homepage

    Not to mention proof of the use of illegal substances.

    I've thought of a pretty evil invention, so don't steal my idea - a urinal or toilet which has a mechanism to instantly scan the sample for metabolites of illegal drugs. A camera at face-level snaps a picture if a positive result is detected, perhaps an alarm could sound as well.

    The military and three-letter agencies could have a much more effective drug-testing program, and without the hassle of relying on external labs or causing workers to miss time.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @02:09AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @02:09AM (#430984)
    Using illegal drugs isn't illegal. Possession and sale of them is though. Which is why no one ever gets arrested for testing positive for drug use, just denied employment.
    • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday November 22 2016, @02:39AM

      by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Tuesday November 22 2016, @02:39AM (#430991) Homepage

      Being denied employment could be worse than being arrested if you're hurtin' for money -- especially if you're denied further employment at a place you're already working.

      That's one of the reasons why I chose electronics/computer science as a career -- If I fuck up, I don't have to worry about losing any license (as in with the medical field or law or even engineering) and getting fucked in the long-term as well as the short-term.

      Actually, in the military, you can go to the brig for pissing hot. They own your ass until they don't. You won't go to the brig for weed, but you could very possibly go for coke or MDMA, if only for a month, if you go to court-martial with an unsympathetic jury. But again, the worst part isn't going to the brig, it's being kicked out with an other-than-honorable discharge. The military, now, has zero tolerance for dope. This ain't your dad's military where everybody smoked joints and slammed heroin after their shift. I was there, and I saw many fools get military-themed tattoos and then get kicked out for using acid with less than a year of total service because they treated the military experience like the college experience. That was especially painful to me, because I knew my friends in college back home were having all kinds of drug-addled fun and there I was stuck in bumfuck Deep-South gritting my teeth taking orders from retards.

      You can get away with using dope in the military if you self-refer to their substance abuse program...but the important stipulation if you don't want to be kicked out means that you cannot already be under investigation, and the CID/OSI place moles.