Slashdot Mirror
Secret Printer ID Codes May Be Illegal In the EU
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "In response to a query from a member of the EU Parliament, an EU commissioner issued an official statement (.DOC) saying that, while they do not violate any laws, secret printer tracking dot codes may violate the human right to privacy guaranteed by the EU's Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. If you don't remember what these are, Slashdot has discussed the issue before. In short, most color printers print small yellow dots on every sheet in a code that identifies the printer and, potentially, its owner. The EFF is running an awareness campaign, and a couple of years back made a start on deciphering the yellow dot code."
And you need to make sure you never print anything that can be tied to to if you send it to the government, like a tax return.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Or install the driver...
Come on, if you use a grocery loyalty card and cash every single time, there is no tie to your spending habits. Until you accidentally use a credit card once. And then your entire history can be backfilled.
Better option? Old printer or black ink/toner only printer.
I'd like to see somebody sue the printer companies for prematurely drawing down the yellow ink.
Just because your human eye can't see yellow dots on a yellow background doesn't mean a chemical analysis couldn't spot it. Hell, for all we know, they might glow bright green under blacklight.
The EFF has some handy dandy info on this very subject, http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Sigh...
No-one ever gets this right. Including the summary of this article.
The Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, is a document of The Council of Europe.
It has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the European Union. This is not the same organization, despite having SIMILAR membership, and the word Europe in the title. In fact, not all Council of Europe members are actually European -- Turkey for example.
There are a couple of differences between license plates and this.
a)The license plates are clearly visible, while the printer code is intended to be unnoticeable by the user. I.e, most users don't even know they are being tracked.
b)When you drive your car you are using public infrastructure, such as the roads. In many countries there is no obligation to have license plates on a car you only use in a private space.
c) The license plate identifies one particular car, not [necessarily] the factory that made it. The printer code identifies the printer, not the paper it is on.
I'm sure there is more, but clearly the parent post is just another example that car analogies suck.
No, it's definetly a hardware level process, you get them even with internal printer status/info pages (assuming they are color).
On the bright side, most color lasers do not insert the yellow dots on black and white pages, though a few models from various manufactures DO tag every single page.
This signature is lame.
even in the US constitution, is there ANY real clauses that talk about right to privacy?
Please see Amendment 4, Amendment 5, Amendment 9 and Amendment 10.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Hate Microsoft (or the EU) all you want, but this is rather stupid as a reason.
...to prevent counterfeiting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Of course, EXIF is a pretty open standard and there exist numerous utilities to strip the data out when desired. You very well might not want everyone on Flikr to know the serial number of your camera. There is also a "Maker's section" where the camera manufacturers can place non standard, obfuscated and / or encrypted data.
Both Canon and Nikon use these features to create a system to prove that a given camera actually took a given picture. So it can go both ways depending on how you have your tin foil situated.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The answer, probably not, I think his Minolta is the same engine as my Lexmark which detects which toner cartridge is in which slot and refuses to print if you swap them about, besides which, the black cartridge is physically a bit bigger. However, you could refill a yellow cartridge with black toner. I wouldn't recommend this unless you're going to buy a new yellow cartridge to replace it.
I believe that Canon has explicitly stated that the feature has to be manually turned on, and that there is a non-trivial setup process to get it working. In other words, the privacy implications of the feature are essentially nonexistant.
Watermarking technology for copyright-protection already exists. Canon is simply one of the first to be building it into their cameras.
Given that image plagiarism is a legitimate problem for professional photographers, the feature does make a good bit of sense.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
P.S. - If you can get some, print a color page on black paper (preferably semi-gloss), the dots stand out really well
They stand out just fine on white paper under blue light, as one of the EFF pages illustrates.
1. Every color laser printer made in the last 10 years from every manufacturer that I have ever encountered uses the "yellow dots" tagging.
Then I guess you haven't encountered HP 4500 or HP 8500 series printers (maybe they don't need to be repaired as much?). One of the other EFF pages lists a number of other printer models that don't use yellow dots (which isn't to say that they don't use some other kind of tagging).
-- Alastair