Every problem contract , term newspaper , and yard sale flyer you ’ve printed at dwelling house may have something in mutual . According toQuartz , several large - name printer caller have been embedding conceal tracking codes in documents for decades .
The exercise is no clandestine : It was first holler to the world ’s attention by an clause that ran onPCWorldin 2004 . That report revealed that Xerox embeds chronological sequence of tiny yellow back breaker on every weather sheet of report that passes through one of their copiers or optical maser printers . Known as printer cryptography , the bunch are stagger about an inch aside across the entire page , but with each Mexican valium spanning a millimeter in size they ’re unacceptable to detect without the right equipment . If they were blown up and made darker you ’d be capable to see an encoded subject matter contain the sequent number and manufacture code of the source pressman .
Unless you expend your printer for illicit purposes , this likely is n’t something you need to care about . The codes are there to make it easier for theSecret Serviceto track counterfeiter . " It ’s a trail back to you , like a licence plate , " Peter Crean , a former senior enquiry fellow at Xerox , toldPCWorld .
With the advent of the color printing machine come a new elbow room for felons to forge money and legal documents . Coded dots were first used to battle this problem in Japan , and they became standard in Xerox color printer betray in America in the mid-1980s .
Printer manufacturers are n’t obligate to implement the technology by law , so there ’s a luck it ’s neglect from your electronic computer . There ’s also no law forcing companies to be upfront about this hidden feature , so if your printer does have it , it may be hard to tell . One way to check is with a blue LED light and a magnifying shabu : If the lily-livered dots show up you may be sure that varlet is traceable back to your printer , whether you mail it across the state or staple it to a telephone pole .
[ h / tQuartz ]
