The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a consumer privacy and digital rights organization, alleged Tuesday that there are codes embedded in printouts made by some color laser printers that can be used to track the origin of a printed document.
The codes are ostensibly a part of anti-counterfeiting measures developed by government agencies to curb the creation of fake currency but could have serious implications for consumer privacy, according to privacy advocates.
A research team led by the EFF said that it has broken the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.
“We’ve found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer,” said Seth David Schoen, staff technologist at EFF.
Technology that helps catch crooks is fine. It’s trusting the guys who are “catching the crooks” that concerns me.
EFF and its partners began their project to break the printer code with the Xerox DocuColor line. Researchers compared dots from test pages, noting similarities and differences in their arrangement, and then found a simple way to read the pattern, the foundation said.
“So far, we’ve only broken the code for Xerox DocuColor printers,” said Mr. Schoen. “But we believe that other models from other manufacturers include the same personally identifiable information in their tracking dots.”
EFF has said that the tracking data is used by government agencies, especially the United States Secret Service, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters.
A Secret Service spokesperson, Jonathan Cherry, said the organization does work with other government agencies and “industry partners on preventive technological countermeasures designed to discourage the illegal use of printers and copiers in the production of counterfeit currencies.”
The EFF has said that the latest discovery calls for greater transparency in the workings between the technology industry and the government.
“It shows how the government and private industry make backroom deals to weaken our privacy by compromising everyday equipment like printers,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien. “The logical next question is: What other deals have been or are being made to ensure that our technology rats on us?”
A lo of parents tell their children to say a prayer at night and the child prays to an unknown god in the sky. The child assumes god is watching them.
In either case we can assume that someone is going to make us pay for something we should not have done.
The government has always kept track of my movements since my early twenties.
This is scary.
Schoen said that the existence of the encoded information could be a threat to people who live in repressive governments or those who have a legitimate need for privacy. It reminds him, he said, of a program the Soviet Union once had in place to record sample typewriter printouts in hopes of tracking the origins of underground, self-published literature.
“It’s disturbing that something on this scale, with so many privacy implications, happened with such a tiny amount of publicity,” Schoen said.
And it’s not as if the information is encrypted in a highly secure fashion, Schoen said. The EFF spent months collecting samples from printers around the world and then handed them off to an intern, who came back with the results in about a week.
This encoding is nothing new. Six years ago, A Xerox tech provided me with a detailed explanation while he performed routine maintenance to my color copier/printer. He even showed how it worked — using a printout from my machine.