This gonna be pretty important in the next years... people, if you plan on printing protest flyers and pamphlets, either get them done in a professional print shop (if you know someone you can trust, that is), or at the very least buy the printer in cash, never ever connect it to the Internet, and only connect it via USB to a Linux computer - macOS and Windows both will install printer drivers automatically that might phone back to the mothership and link your printer ID to some sort of identifier.
For reference how this was done in the totalitarian countries of the eastern block: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat
Get a silkscreen kit if you really care that much. Also allows you to print T-Shirts.
Wouldn't it be way easier to just track the people handing out the flyers?
That depends on whether:
1. You're looking for a very specific person.
2. You want to unconstitutionally punish somebody for free speech, and you don't care who, you just want to cheaply find a convenient victim.
In that respect, tracking-dots are an invitation to #2, since they don't really need much in the way of human labor-hours or focus.
Tracking dots can be used to confirm that a specific printer was used to print a specific page. However, going from only a serial number to finding the name and address of its owner is going to be very difficult to impossible. You might be able to track it down to the retailer, but if you buy your printer in person from a stack at Costco, nobody has any idea which printer has which serial number.
>However, going from only a serial number to finding the name and address of its owner is going to be very difficult to impossible.
Printers send telemetry to the mothership, including serial number. Anyone under NSL cannot disclose that fact, so it's possible (probable) that if OEMs are pulling serial numbers, computer names, usernames, registered owner names, IP address logs, that they are NSL to retain and/or redirect that data feed.
It explains why everything, everything is so ****ing leaky with your information (beyond just advertising). Where do you think our modern machine learning came from? It was in order to process this stupendously gigantic mountain of data! I'm sure Utah was running some less efficient prototype of the learning we see in the public today back in the time of the GWOT!
So no, it's not just to confirm, as a few privileged individuals [at best] can go to terminals and pull up gobs of information. This is one of the reasons seeing-sphere-company's stock has done so well recently (money money for me)!
This also gets into the evil of parallel construction, where unconstitutional or at least beyond-voter-awareness method is used, and they make up a different reason afterwards.
Until you install the windows print driver. Which phones home to the manufacturer with your ip address, other computer details, and the discovered printer’s serial number.
Source?
Sure! Here's HP¹. You can look up others on your own:
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Product Usage Data – We collect product usage data such as pages printed, print mode, media used, ink or toner brand, file type printed (.pdf, .jpg, etc.), application used for printing (Word, Excel, Adobe Photoshop, etc.), file size, time stamp, and usage and status of other printer supplies. We do not scan or collect the content of any file or information that might be displayed by an application.
Device Data – We collect information about your computer, printer and/or device such as operating system, firmware, amount of memory, region, language, time zone, model number, first start date, age of device, device manufacture date, browser version, device manufacturer, connection port, warranty status, unique device identifiers, advertising identifiers and additional technical information that varies by product.¹ https://web.archive.org/web/20190828162443/https://www8.hp.c...
Or, you know, just print massive quantities of valid but randomized tracking dots all over the document using a printer you bought with cash?
Remember the Russian civilians arrested for protesting the war by waving yellow pieces of paper?
Could we just print using yellow paper to make the dots indistinguishable from the background?
Melted toner pallets are shiny and contrast well against paper. I'd set the document background to be a sold yellow before printing it (assuming the privacy invading dots are guaranteed to be yellow).