Deeplinks Blog by Seth Schoen | June 6, 2017
Several journalists and experts have recently focused on the fact that a scanned document published by The Intercept contained tiny yellow dots produced by a Xerox DocuColor printer. Those dots allow the document's origin and date of printing to be ascertained, which could have played a role in...
EFF submitted FOIA requests to several government agencies seeking information related to the agencies' use of "printer dots" -- tracking codes embedded in pages printed from certain printers.
In a purported effort to identify counterfeiters the US government has succeeded in persuading some color laser printer manufacturers to encode...
Deeplinks Blog by Mark Rumold | March 16, 2011
This week marks the seventh annual Sunshine Week, a national initiative to promote dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. As our little way to celebrate, EFF has recently posted nearly nine thousand pages of government documents to our site. For the majority of these...
Deeplinks Blog by Seth Schoen | January 23, 2009
In a recent review of the HP Color LaserJET CM3530 printer, the magazine Government Computer News called out the use of tracking codes -- which GCN referred to as "a secret spy program" -- as the biggest problem with that printer. GCN found that the yellow dots produced by...
Deeplinks Blog by Richard Esguerra | October 24, 2008
Since late 2004, EFF has been warning the public about "printer dots" -- tiny yellow dots that appear on documents produced by many color laser printers and copiers. These yellow dots form a coded pattern on every page the printer produces and can be used to identify specific details about...
Deeplinks Blog by Danny O'Brien | February 13, 2008
We've long been concerned about the human rights risks of printer tracking dots for anyone who publishes printed works with modern technology. Tracking dots are the secret marks that many popular color laser printers and photocopiers scatter across every document they touch. The marks, almost invisible to the eye,...
Press Release | October 16, 2005
Tiny Dots Show Where and When You Made Your Print San Francisco - A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document. The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information...
Note: As of October 13th, 2005, some information in this paper may be out of date. Please visit //eff.org/issues/printers for the most up-to-date information on this project. Please note that EFF is no longer requesting or accepting samples of printer dots.IntroductionOn Nov. 22, 2004, PC World published an ...