
DocuColor Tracking Dot Decoding Guide - sr2
https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/
======
Matt3o12_
How is a printer able to print those dots on so many pages? At some point,
this special yellow ink must become depleted, right?

Or does it use the regular ink which is provided by the printer's cartridge?
If this is the case, isn't a possible defense to just not buy new color
cartridges? At least for me, I have to print colored documents at most every 3
months. Unfortunately the color cartridges dries out after about 6 months
which means I would have to pay $20 to print less then 10 pages. Thus, I only
buy the black ones and when I have to print something in color, I just put it
on a USB stick and print it at work (I am allowed to do that in moderate
amounts) or go to a shop with printing services and pay $1 for those
documents.

Since my color cartridges are almost two years old (and still full according
to my printer), though I cannot print a single page, am I still "affected" by
those tracking dots?

~~~
swiley
You should probably just buy a black and white laser printer. They're not much
more expensive than inkjets anymore, have excellent Linux support, and you get
hundreds of pages per cartridge.

Anecdotally mine occasionally adds garbage to the page, I don't know if this
is for tracking or if it's just an artifact of the process, but I haven't
really been able to trust a printer for years.

------
late2part
Thanks you, EFF for giving us useful information about how the government and
colluding corporations wish to track us.

------
colanderman
I wonder if these are uniformly offset from the printed image, and if so,
whether printers incorporate any protection to prevent the user from printing
yellow dots near enough to them to mask the signature. (If so, it should be
easy to make an extension to add such confounding dots to all printed
material…)

