Maybe Those Guys Aren’t So Paranoid After All..
Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004Every once and a while, you read a story about some person saying that the government is tracking you via implanted RFID chips, or the government is listening to all of your conversations via the Constar system in your car. Most people laugh these stories off as the paranoid delusions of conspiracy theorists go amuck. Well, you may want to rethink it:
WASHINGTON–Next time you make a printout from your color laser printer, shine an LED flashlight beam on it and examine it closely with a magnifying glass. You might be able to see the small, scattered yellow dots printer there that could be used to trace the document back to you.
According to experts, several printer companies quietly encode the serial number and the manufacturing code of their color laser printers and color copiers on every document those machines produce. Governments, including the United States, already use the hidden markings to track counterfeiters.
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 article doesn’t say, but it appears that only color laser printers do this, not color inkjet printers. Also, unless you register your purchase for your warranty I don’t know how they would trace a particular serial number to you, especially if you bought the printer second-hand. Still, this disturbs me a little.
I am not one of those people who scream every time the government says they need to know something about me, but I like my privacy. Also, by publicizing this process, isn’t any potential gain from it negated? I mean, I know that if I am going to write a ransom note tomorrow, I’m sure as hell not going to use a color laser printer now. I guess I’ll have to go back to cutting letters out of the newspaper. What do you think?
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