Privacy is an Illusion.

One day I had to print some important papers. I thought to my self no big deal I had just bought a fresh cartridge of black ink. So, I print the documents and much to my surprise the pages came out with much of the content missing. This could not be right, this is a new printer with brand new ink inside. I decide to check the printer and I see a message “No Yellow Ink”.

This is weird, I was not printing in yellow so why would the pages not come out readable if I am only printing in black and white? I decide to do some investigation and what I found will shock anyone. Personal printers have been with us for decades, surely everyone knows exactly how they work by now right?

Well get this, in the 1980’s Xerox developed a way for the device that printed a document to be tracked including clues of the where the printed document originated from. This is called a “Machine Identification Code”. Every time you print there are invisible yellow dots that represent information about the printer as well as clues about who owns the machine. The information represented includes the serial number of the machine as well as the date and time of printing. This is then repeated several times on the page.

Apparently these “tracking dots” were originally developed to reassure authorities that high end laser printers could not be used to print counterfeit money. There is one such incident where authorities from the Netherlands were able to use these tracking dots to tack down a ring of counterfeiters that were using a Canon color laser printer.

That being said everyone should be aware that you don’t necessarily need to be online to leave a digital footprint. from the metadata that is created every time we take a picture with a smart device to even printing out movie tickets, pretty much everything we do has some trace f who we are attached to it.

Thanks for reading this weeks issue of The Cyberdeck!

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