Summary
You may not be aware that your printer is leaving a trail that could point directly to you. Xerox, as well as other printer manufacturing companies, has been developing this tracking technology for over 20 years. A small microchip located near the laser beam on these printers prints out a series of small yellow dots that, when decoded, reveal the serial number of the printer that the document was printed on. Once this information is gathered, authorities can contact the manufacturer and some, like Xerox, will release the name of the printer owner to law enforcement authorities. The United States government has been working with Xerox to track down counterfeiters who used color laser printers to print fake currency. Several other countries are also interested in this technology.
Original source:
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1093&u=/pcworld/118664&printer=1
Details
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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.
- 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.
- Laser-printing technology makes it incredibly easy to counterfeit money and documents, and Crean says the dots, in use in some printers for decades, allow law enforcement to identify and track down counterfeiters.
- However, they could also be employed to track a document back to any person or business that printed it.
- Although the technology has existed for a long time, printer companies have not been required to notify customers of the feature.
- Lorelei Pagano, a counterfeiting specialist with the U.S. Secret Service, stresses that the government uses the embedded serial numbers only when alerted to a forgery.
- Neither Crean nor Pagano has an estimate of how many laser printers, copiers, and multifunction devices track documents, but they say that the practice is commonplace among major printer companies.
- "We developed the first (encoding mechanism) in house because several countries had expressed concern about allowing us to sell the printers in their country," Crean says.
- A recent article points to the Dutch government as using similar anticounterfeiting methods, and cites Canon as a company with encoding technology.
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