For nearly two decades, New York City has been cracking down on food-stamp fraud by fingerprinting eligible recipients. The measure has saved millions of dollars. But it now appears that the program is doomed—Governor Cuomo has said he will put an end to fingerprinting food-stamp recipients and so remove what critics see as an unnecessarily harsh requirement for needed benefits.

Mr. Cuomo paraphrased his father and predecessor, Mario Cuomo, in signaling his support for phasing out the fingerprinting requirement. “It is important that government leads using its head and its heart,” he said, echoing a phrase Mario Cuomo used during his 12 years in office. He’s right—government cannot be heartless, nor can it be unthinking.

Only the unthinking would argue that government should simply hand out benefits without making some inquiries about eligibility. But the fingerprinting process does have a heartless quality to it. After all, fingerprinting is most associated with criminal suspects. Poor people should not be made to feel as though they are criminals for simply asking for help to feed their families. “You cannot stigmatize these New Yorkers,” said Lt. Gov. Robert Duffy. He’s right.

That said, the Cuomo administration needs to devise a better way to combat fraud, using both its heart and its head. After all, those who game the system inevitably hurt those who genuinely need public assistance of some sort, whether in the form of food stamps, workers’ compensation or welfare.

Fingerprinting does conjure images of criminalization. That’s a burden the poor should not have to carry.

But the abandonment of fingerprinting should not mean an end to government crackdowns on frauds and cheats.

The state should come up with a better alternative.

As the newest installment of The Journal's What They Know series details, the next step is creating a digital fingerprint for every computing device in the world.

Like a fingerprint, every computer has a set of parameters which make it possible to create a unique ID. California based BlueCava has catalogued 200 million devices so far, and hopes to have a billion by the end of next year. 

Unlike cookies, which users can delete or prevent from being shared, it is extremely difficult to disguise the identity of a device from these kinds of fingerprinting techniques. 

The Journal couldn't resist dipping into the quirky history of this fingerprinting technique. "BlueCava's secret sauce hails from Sydney, Australia, in the early 1990s. Back then, inventor Ric Richardson was helping musicians including the band INXS to use new software for playing their electronic keyboards."

Richardson wanted to let customers test out his software without giving them the ability to pirate copies for friends. So he developed a way to identify computers based on hundreds of individual properties like fonts, screen size and clock settings. Only authorized machines could run his software.

Once a machine is IDed, BlueCava matches that data with offline records from companies that collect voter rolls and DMV info. The complete profile can be extremely detailed.

"I think cookies are a joke," BlueCava CEO David Norris told The Journal. "The system is archaic and was invented by accident. We've outgrown it, and it's time for the next thing."