Why do people jump so eagerly to this assumption about the wishes of the dead being unimportant? We honor wishes of the living concerning the exterior world beyond the mere facts about their brain state (e.g., someone can justly want to climb Mount Everest or set a world record, and not just believe they have). Continuing to respest their reasonable wishes after they die is not fundamentally different, e.g., not desecrating their bodies, even if they don't have family who would be upset.

How would this be different from using someone’s fingerprints to identify them, if they had no ID on them or any other ID method? Is that desecration too?

My understanding is that, generally, the purpose of identification is to find living relatives. It's a matter of respect - identification allows for appropriate rites to be provided, while this is taking advantage of the fact that the dead have no rights to use the prints for their own purposes.

Ok, but respect of disrespect is not the same as desecration, which is what was being argued. Just because we don’t like something does not mean we dress it up as something else.

True, desecration is too strong a word in my opinion. I'm not familiar enough with other cultures and religions to say whether that would be true for everyone.

The corpse was hardly desecrated. It's finger was used in an attempt to figure out why drug dealing killed it. I would posit replacing it's fluids with embalming solution to be more intrusive.