In 1891, a Croatian born, Argentine criminologist, Juan Vucetich, started building up the first modern-style fingerprint archive. Since then, fingerprints have become one of the main forms of evidence used to convict criminals. Here, a police officer spreads dust on the lock of a burglarized apartment. Fingerprints become visible.

He uses an adhesive film to capture the fingerprint. Then he glues it to a piece of paper. In the past, comparing fingerprints was a painstaking affair. Officers had to compare fingerprints found at the scene of a crime, one-by-one, with those of possible suspects. These days computers do the job.

Taking fingerprints used to be a messy affair - with ink and dirty hands. These days scanners have replaced the inky mess. And the data can immediately be sent to a database and turned into biometrical data.

The computer identifies typical spots within the ridge patterns of the fingerprint. These include forks in the lines, spots and the location of the center of the print. Fingerprints are never the same between two people - not even with identical twins.

No chance! Here, officials use fingerprint scanners during an election in Nigeria. It's how they make sure the people voting are registered voters and that they only vote once.

This is an important question for officials who have to decide about the refugee or asylum status of applicants. In the European Union all migrants are supposed to have their fingerprints taken at the first point of entry - provided, of course, the local police officers are equipped with the scanners.

Many smartphones now come with fingerprint recognition software, such as the iPhone's Touch-ID. The owner of the phone unlocks it with his fingerprint. If someone else finds or steals the phone, they have no way of getting at any encrypted data within.

This is an Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) in the Scottish town of Dundee. Customers wanting to withdraw money need to show biometric proof of identity - in the form of a fingerprint. Not good news for pickpockets.

Since 2005, German passports, and many other passports, contain a digital fingerprint as part of the biometric information stored on a RFID (radio-frequency controlled ID) chip. Other information on the chip includes a biometric passport photo. The facial image is similar to fingerprints: no two images are alike.

Facial recognition software, which uses biometrics, is well advanced. It is possible to identify suspects within large crowds, with surveillance cameras. Also internet services and private computer owners are increasingly making use of facial recognition software to sort holiday pictures and tagging them to names.

Alec Jeffreys discovered DNA-fingerprinting almost accidentally in 1984 during research at the University of Leicester. He identified a specific pattern on DNA segments, which were different for every human. He created a picture, which looks like a barcode at the supermarket.

Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) started storing such barcodes in a federal database in 1998. Investigators have since solved more than 18,000 crimes, using genetic fingerprints.

It's not just criminals who get identified. Many innocent people can be cleared of criminal charges through good identification. For some, technology has saved their lives. Kirk Bloodsworth spent almost nine years on death row. The US Innocence Project has proved the false incarceration of more than 100 people using DNA evidence.

The first big test for DNA-fingerprinting came with the mass murder of Srebrenica. Bodies, exhumed from mass graves, were systematically identified using DNA techniques. They were then reburied by their loved ones. Here, five year old Ema Hasanovic pays last respects to her uncle. More than 6,000 victims of the massacre - mostly men - were identified using DNA-fingerprinting.

You may be surprised, but there's biometric information in sounds and other digital data. Voice recognition software can, for instance, identify people making threatening phone calls - the human voice is also unique. And don't forget: we leave all kinds of digital traces on the internet, which hold clues to who we really are.