If you plan to print out risky political flyers, important informational zines, or any other risky prints you might want to keep some privacy with:
Consider anonymizing your prints.
Most printers leave dots that give identifiable information on the prints. The dots on the prints can be decoded by forensics.
The identifiable information when printed can be prevented with a software called DEDA.
Link to software's repository:
Contribute to dfd-tud/deda development by creating an account on GitHub.
Quote from DEDA repository:
DEDA - tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation toolkit
Document Colour Tracking Dots, or yellow dots, are small systematic dots which encode information about the printer and/or the printout itself. This process is integrated in almost every commercial colour laser printer. This means that almost every printout contains coded information about the source device, such as the serial number.
On the one hand, this tool gives the possibility to read out and decode these forensic features and on the other hand, it allows anonymisation to prevent arbitrary tracking.
If you use this software, please cite the paper: Timo Richter, Stephan Escher, Dagmar Schönfeld, and Thorsten Strufe. 2018. Forensic Analysis and Anonymisation of Printed Documents. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security (IH&MMSec '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 127-138. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3206004.3206019
