Is your printer spying on you?

  • Thread starter Thread starter irwell
  • Start date Start date
Unless you are sending printouts to the Secret Service, no one else, to
my knowledge, is even using this. It was intended to be able to aid in
tracking down counterfeiters.
Besides, all they can get is the serial number, date and number of
pages printed so far... I don't see anything "incriminating" in that...
to get your info from the serial number, they would have to issue a
subpoena to the manufacturer to turn over the registration record...
still no personal info will be there you don't want... last I checked,
no Social security number was required for registration, and it doesn't
fail registration if you give it bad (IE fictitious address) info.
 
Dave said:
Unless you are sending printouts to the Secret Service, no one else, to
my knowledge, is even using this. It was intended to be able to aid in
tracking down counterfeiters.
Besides, all they can get is the serial number, date and number of
pages printed so far... I don't see anything "incriminating" in that...
to get your info from the serial number, they would have to issue a
subpoena to the manufacturer to turn over the registration record...
still no personal info will be there you don't want... last I checked,
no Social security number was required for registration, and it doesn't
fail registration if you give it bad (IE fictitious address) info.
Click to expand...

There is (was) a way to hack a network (or gather other vital information if
available on the network) through printers that were connected via a print
server...this, however, has been mostly plugged so that spying on people
through their printers would be difficult...but not, of course,
impossible...
 
I'm sure the idea behind this was that consumers of these products were
not supposed to be aware of the identification system, so they might
have registered the product, having no idea it might point back to them.

Further people using printers in their workplace might be fingered.

Sure, it might have been designed with counterfeiting in mind, but who
really knows. It can be used for numerous applications, and probably
will be.

Art
 
However, third parties have been able to hack the encryption algorithm
used by some printer manufacturers and can decode the information on
the pages. The more people that have access to this, the more chance
one of them will have the ability to link that data to more personal
information.
 
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