Jul
Color laser printers may be ID’ing themselves with every page
What does your color laser printer say about you? Apparently with every printed page, your color laser printer could be saying plenty. According to a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation most color laser printers use technology that print an identifying code on each and every page you print. The technology uses microscopic yellow dots printed on each page in a grid pattern that can be used to translate into the serial number of the printer and the date the page was printed. Normally invisible to the naked eye, the yellow dots can be seen using a blue LED light.
The reason for the development of the technology was to help investigators like the Secret Service track and foil counterfeiters. Privacy advocate groups, however, claim that the technology could be used to track people like whistle-blowers and political dissidents. “There’s nothing about this technology that limits its application to counterfeit investigations,” stated Seth Schoen with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Some people who aren’t doing anything wrong may have their privacy threatened.”
Perhaps your laser printer is tattling on you and you don’t even know. That could be the case. Schoen recently found 111 models of color laser printers from 13 different manufacturers like Brother, Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, and Xerox to name a few that had the yellow dot coding system on each of them.
Read more at USA Today, via CrunchGear.
Tags: mobile phone, lcd, gps, gear