Drop the AutoMee S onto an iPad and it will buff the finger prints away, wandering around the screen in straight lines, ricocheting of the edges until the entire surface is clean.

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Though the Ministry of Home Affairs has collected the biometrics (ten finger prints and photograph) of around 0.8 million people under the coastal NPR project and around 10.2m people under the NPR project, it has not sent any data to the UID for generating UID numbers.

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Last week police stations around Los Angeles offered to take finger-prints of children so that their parents would have a record if they went missing.

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In the countryside, where most Cambodians live, some villagers have been told their ballots are not secret: satellites will be watching, or super-computers will trace their finger-prints.

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He says the organisation collects sets of similar finger and palm prints so that improvements can be made in the ability to distinguish ordinary sets of prints.

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