The idea that printer ink cartridges could be monitoring everyone’s printing activities may be too far off a conspiracy theory. But in fact, while inkjet cartridges are not the tools of secret government agents, the reality is that the standard inkjet printer could have left a hidden spy trail all the way to the bottom.
It was a well-kept secret that only came to light relatively recently. Over twenty years ago, a secret technology was created in an attempt to prevent counterfeit printing of paper money, official certificates, and classified documents. As a result, it became perfectly possible to trace the author of a forgery produced on high-quality advanced printing machines from the printed counterfeit document.
All that is known about the detection method is that it was based on an encryption of microscopic dot patterns. Even now, the information is still classified. However, it is still possible to discover whether a printer still possesses the means to secretly encode a page of printed text by carefully examining the page under strong, bright light. A very detailed examination should begin to reveal a faint pattern of yellow dots covering the entire surface of the page.
The microscopic yellow dots are hard-coded, time-stamped, allowing the government or other official security agencies to track down the printer that originally created the page. Although ongoing official secrecy has always been kept, some reports regarding the ‘yellow dot code’ came to light in the periods 2004 and 2008.
It is almost certain that the main intention was only to have the ability to track serious large-scale counterfeiting operations using the limited number of state-of-the-art printers available at the time. However, there have been huge price reductions on mass market color laser printers. It was probably not anticipated that, regardless of size or price, countless small or home-based businesses, as well as businesses and corporations, will have a printer that contains the tracking technology. Previous research found that top brand color laser printers for the home user market contained yellow dot encryption technology.
Unfortunately, there is nothing to prevent a single page printed in a ‘yellow dot code’ carried by a laser printer from being traced back to the original print source. However, in recent years considerable advances have been made in tracking technology. The advantage is that a new generation of highly sophisticated and undetectable encrypted tracking sensors almost certainly would have replaced the original yellow dots.
Therefore, it is highly unlikely, though not entirely impossible, that any modern office or home business will now own a working ink printer that contains the original yellow dot tracking technology.
