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

Simple enough fix

[KublaiKhan]

So to stay private, then, one should print sensitive documents on yellow paper?

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.

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

Re:Simple enough fix

[MrMacman2u]

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.

Re:Simple enough fix

[KublaiKhan]

Could be useful in other ways, if you could incriminate someone else's printer by printing the right code...

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?

Human Rights or European Citizen Rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

... secret printer tracking dot codes may violate the human right to privacy guaranteed by the EU's Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. I'm thinking that I would like to see a meeting between the EU's Convention of Human Rights & the EU's European Commission.

First topic on the agenda: biometrics for visitors.

Or was privacy only guaranteed to European Citizens?

Re:Human Rights or European Citizen Rights?

[owlnation]

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.

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

[corsec67]

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.

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?

Tag badsummary.

[CSMatt]

In short, most color printers print small yellow dots on every sheet in a code that identifies the printer and, potentially, its owner. Every instance I've heard of this involves color laser printers. AFAIK color inkjet printers don't do this.

Re:Tag badsummary.

[ddrichardson]

The idea is to prevent someone from printing $100 bills/IDs/etc on their printer.

Yes but that doesn't mean that it could not be used by, say an agency that wishes to monitor who is distributing political leaflets for example. Looking at the US from the outside, freedom of speech and the press are wonderful - it seems that your government is accessing more and more ways to check how you are using those freedoms.

EFF Code Cracking Guide

[milsoRgen]

The EFF has some handy dandy info on this very subject, http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/

Nobody noticed...

[Poodleboy]

Doesn't anyone notice that the EU's "official statement" was released as a .DOC file? So, if I'm a citizen of the EU, I have to pay money to Microsoft to participate in my government?

What's worse is that we're so inured to this sort of thing, nobody even noticed!

Fenestrae delendae sunt.

No big deal

[PPH]

All of the documents produced in our office have a large brown ring stamped on them that can be traced back to the coffee mug of the engineer that produced them.

Re:Privacy is over-rated.

[BlueParrot]

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.

Re:"human right to privacy"

[sconeu]

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.

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.

virtual MOD points.

[JonTurner]

Best suggestion yet.
Yes, in theory adding random dots would introduce noise into the signal and potentially degrade it to the points it's no longer useful, but only if you can interfere with the pattern. Put another way, unless you know the location of the dot codes, to reach the level of noise necessary to obscure you'd have to cover the page; there would be so many random yellow dots so as to be perceptible.