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Your Colour Laser is Watching You !

Bob2002

ULTIMATE Member
Apparently several colour laser manufacturers have been embedding serial numbers in every document you print for some time now !

... Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company's laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro series, put the "serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots" in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins.

"It's a trail back to you, like a license plate," Crean says.

The dots' minuscule size, covering less than one-thousandth of the page, along with their color combination of yellow on white, makes them invisible to the naked eye, Crean says. One way to determine if your color laser is applying this tracking process is to shine a blue LED light--say, from a keychain laser flashlight--on your page and use a magnifier. ...

Article here - http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1093&e=4&u=/pcworld/20041122/tc_pcworld/118664 - some discussion here - http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/11/22/2327254.shtml?tid=158&tid=194&tid=17 . :shrug:
 
This is a pre-cursor to technology that is being developed by several manufacturers, where confidential documents will have invisible code similar to this, which will make it easier to find out who leaked that document if it turns up where it shouldn't.

Lexmark were caught out recently too, with one of their MFP's contacting Lexmark with information such as print coverage % etc. I have a Lexmark and have set my firewall to deny any Lexmark software access to the printer.
 
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The authorities seem obsessed by counterfeiting. It's all well and good manipulating printer output or packages like Photoshop so that they can't make perfect copies but there are always ways around these tricks - not to mention the fact that unless you have access to the correct paper (or plastic I think the Australians use) your effort will stick out like a sore thumb. :confused:

The article talks about several manufacturers which I suppose means there must be some who don't do this. I'd be interested to know who they are. :hrmph:
 
it has very little to do with counterfeiting - the vast majority of copiers will either reproduce the note with 'not legal tender' or similar printed across it or will produce a blank space. That isn't new.

This feature is to do with companies being able to trace the originator of a confidential document etc and will eventually go down to user level data and include print-outs (as opposed to copies). For example, say a bank employee supplied account details to a criminal and the police found the print-outs. That employee would be immediately identified and dealt with.

Some manufacturers already have this in a limited way (ie, including the copier serial no), the rest of the functionality is being developed and it will be common in the not too distant future.

Privacy concerns are countered by 2 things - the security benefits and the fact that we are talking about company equipment being used - why shouldn't a company be able to check what their equipment is being used for?
 
Not really - it's not like there is some big database with a copy of everything every user has copied or printed which reports back to some director or whoever - the company has to have copy of the document that they want to check (ie there is something already suspicious about it to make them want to check it in the first place) to be able to discover the user or machine info.

It is already possible on most business machines (particularly MFPs) to check how much any given user/dept is copying or printing anyway, so this wouldn't make much difference in that respect (the administrator can find usage stats, though it depends on how the machine is set up exactly what info is included).

It's just a way of creating a paper trail and therefore accountability. Given that many companies have a great deal of personal information about their customers, I have no problems with that.
 
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