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."

Comments

Re:Simple enough fix

[corsec67]

My color laser printer (Konica-Minolta 2530DL) only prints the yellow dots in color mode.

But that printer is a bit different in that it rotates the toner cartridges into place for every color that is going to go on each page, so a color page has to wait for all 4(CMYK) cartridges to rotate into place, but in black-only mode doesn't rotate anything to be about 5-6x faster.

The reason I chose that printer? Konica-Minolta supplies open-source printer drivers that compiled on my AMD64-Ubuntu box.

Prevent your printer from being registered

[wwphx]

1. Do not buy from the manufacturer.
2. Maybe pay cash when buying printer.
3. Do not send in warranty card.
4. Don't let a factory rep or facility service it.

If you can prevent the printer's serial # from being tied to your identity, you should be OK. Of course, some of the very high-end printers can only be bought from the manufacturer or a registered VAR, so don't use those types of printers for nefarious deeds.

I don't know about printers, but apparently with Canon digital cameras they will register the camera serial number with your name if you send it in to Canon for service.

Re:Prevent your printer from being registered

[MrMacman2u]

I am a printer technician for Canon, Xerox, HP, Lexmark, etc... I deal with thousands of printers, both color and black and white.

1. Every color laser printer made in the last 10 years from every manufacturer that I have ever encountered uses the "yellow dots" tagging.

2. You have 300-12k hanging around in cash? Go for it.

3. You're not going to take advantage of the "get out of jail free" card the absolves you from a 300-1000 dollar repair for one year. Other than that, this may prevent your identiy from being tied to your shiney new printer.

4. Goooooood luck. When it breaks, you need someone to fix it or you will be dumping a ton of cash out fairly often for new machines.

I'd like to know why this is such a big deal to individual people first off. This system has been in place for more than a decade in most machines and no one has ever said anything before, nor, I believe, has it ever been used to screw someone over OR catch a criminal...

Am I saying I agree with the practice of tagging every page? Heck NO! I've never liked the idea since they introduced it originally, I believe, to prevent people from using high end laser printers to counterfiet money and if they did, to trace it back to the one(s) responsible.

To my knowledge, it's never been used as such. I implore someone to prove me wrong if I am.

The only ones that should be even overly concerned (aside from wasted toner and unneeded wear and tear on printing components) is large companies or government institutions.

This whole issue is not a major one. It's more of an annoyance that would be nice if it was removed.

P.S. - If you can get some, print a color page on black paper (preferably semi-gloss), the dots stand out really well... failing that if you have a large high volume printer available with a transfer belt easily veiwable, start a 4 page print job and pop the cover halfway through to force it to jam, the dots are sometimes (depends on the model and stage of the imaging process) very visible on the belt.

Re:Prevent your printer from being registered

[ntk]

You're not likely to hear how who was affected by this, for the same reason that it's been almost unknown to the consumers buying your printers for the last decade: it's been convenient to keep this "feature" of their purchases secret. Or do you think that if the US government and manufacturers had publicly announced their agreement, there would have been a calm acceptance by Americans of the importance of paying for a system to invisibly watermark their own printouts?

I'm glad that your primary concern is large companies and government institutions. As I wrote in the EFF Deeplink, our concern includes dissidents working in authoritarian regimes who remain ignorant about this feature of the technology they use to spread their work, and the authoritarian governments intent on tracing and suppressing their citizen's literature and information sources -- who are not so ignorant.

Do you think the printer companies would proudly mention if their tracking technology was used to catch these undesirables?

Re:Prevent your printer from being registered

[operagost]

Every color laser printer made in the last 10 years from every manufacturer that I have ever encountered uses the "yellow dots" tagging.

Not according to the EFF; for example, Oki is clean. Do you service those? What method did you use to detect the dots?

Re:Prevent your printer from being registered

[cicho]

"I'd like to know why this is such a big deal to individual people first off. "

For the very same reasons it was a big deal (to some) and not such a big deal (to others) that the communist government here in Poland, up until late 1980s, had every single typewriter registered, with a typed page on file. I imagine the same went on in other countries of the Soviet bloc.

You said yourself the dot patterns were not being used to fight crime, I guess that's your answer right there.

I guess the rule of the thumb is simple. When the government mandates such a thing, it is not for your good.

find the dots

[gEvil (beta)]

If any of you have a blue LED (like those found on keychain or pen lights), you can fairly easily see the pattern of dots on a color laser printout (like anything printed in color from Kinkos).

Re:Simple enough fix

[corsec67]

Oh yeah, well my printer can print yellow even when it's in grayscale mode! *rolls eyes*

Hmm, yeah, I did phrase that badly. But, color/grayscale mode is relevant to the page printed, and the printer could put the yellow dots down on an otherwise grayscale page, just that for that specific model it would be much slower.

regardless...

[owlnation]

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.

Nevertheless, in the UK it's probable that such codes will become not only permissible, but compulsory. After all, how might terrorist propaganda be traced to its source otherwise?

I'd like to think the above paragraph is a joke. But it's not. Night is falling on the UK.

Re:Confusing the code

[corsec67]

Even worse, what if you took a printer that doesn't print the codes, and got someone else's printer code, and printed that on the page?
Good way to frame someone?

"This must have come from your printer, the serial number is embedded in the page"

Re:Simple enough fix

[SethJohnson]

So I guess the yellow dots get inserted at the hardware level.. Could you do us a favor and check those open source printer drivers to see if the yellow dots are inserted at the software level? If so, you might be able to recruit more Ubuntu users if you could offer yellow-dot-free drivers....

Seth

What about digital cameras?

[MoxFulder]

Are there any digital cameras that watermark photos with identifying information? So that if you take a photo and post it on the internet, the manufacturer/government could track it, even if you strip out the EXIF data?

I'm curious...

Re:What about digital cameras?

[Bandman]

I don't remember which models were supposed to start it, but Canon has a couple that are going to scan your eye and "encode" that information into the photo. They claim it's so you can protect yourself from IP infringement.

Re:What about digital cameras?

[Applekid]

There has been some research done in this area. It's not really intentional, but the nature of the CCD sensors. When they're made, they have a target count on how many megapixels it has and not all of them (at least short of research labs) are functional.

Sometimes you can see specifications like "12 Megapixels, 11.1 effective".

These defects are scattered among the surface of the CCD and are statistically unique from one camera to another, even among the same model. While the photos often aren't saved in raw formats, I'd wager if they find a picture of something illegal and wanted to prove your camera took the picture, it'd be trivial to take some pictures with it and match the output files' flaws even with the JPEG encoding by using a control camera of the same shot.

Like how they do ballistic analysis by finding a suspect's gun and fire off a few rounds and compare with rounds found at the scene of a crime.

Re:What about digital cameras?

[element-o.p.]

Very cool...I wrote a one-liner script** on my linux box to look at some JPEGs I recently took with my Canon Powershot. It looks like it is definitely recording make and model of the camera, and a time/date stamp, but I don't see any thing in the Exif data that is *obviously* a serial number. However, that could just be a limitation of my script, since I'm throwing away all of the binary data. Now I'm gonna have to go look for an Exif reader program to see for sure

**Here's my one-liner for anyone who's interested in parsing your own Exif data:
cat | sed "s/[^a-zA-Z0-9\!\@\#\$\%\^\&\*\(\)\:\;\'\"\,\<\.\>\/\?]//g" | grep Exif

TRAITOR

[DrSkwid]

If you've known about this since 1997 why didn't you tell anybody ? The EFF only started working on it in 2005

> I'd like to know why this is such a big deal to individual people first off.

Because some of us actually organise against the machinations of the state, perhaps you've heard of extraordinary rendition the US govt. has been doing or the 30,000 Argentines who were disappeared between 1976 and 1978 for opposing their govt.

It is extraordinarily naive of you to think that having previously secret (thanks in part to YOU) invisible identifying marks on every document printed from your printer isn't a cause for concern.

Re:Simple enough fix

[sricetx]

Well, couldn't the open source driver be modified to add additional random yellow dots, thereby obfuscating the dot code from the hardware?

Re:Simple enough fix

[Belial6]

The next question would be... Can you put a black or cyan cartridge in the yellow slot to make the dots show up bright and clear for easier identification? If so, it would make it easier to see what these printers do. Perticularly when yellow lines are drawn through the codes.