What started as an inquiry into an article by PC World rapidly became a revelation into how your color laser printer could be spying on you. Following up on the article, members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation wondered how their printer could be relaying information to government and law enforcement. Well after several months of sleuthing and donated pages from volunteers' printers around the world, the EFF announced the results of their findings.
Using a coded series of micro-sized yellow dots that it prints right along with your page, many modern printers are recording the date, time, and serial number of the printer. The government says this is to prevent counterfeiters from printing currency using a high-res color printer (much like the government software that is now embedded into Photoshop). But the privacy implications are clear: anyone can now identify separate documents that come from the same printer.
So if you print one anonymous document followed by another that includes personal identifiers, someone, somewhere can link those two documents to one source. Not to mention that law enforcement could obtain sales information related to that printer's serial number from product distributors - who most likely will have serial numbers tied to your order.
The EFF has posted results of their findings, along with a list of printers that seem to show this forensic watermarking (mine included!)
Prepare for printer dots to star in a future episode of CSI.
(via BoingBoing)
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