THE TRACKING DOTS PROJECT

Many color laser printers and color photocopiers encode the date, the serial number, and the type designation with every document those machines produce.
These codes are invisible to the human eye as they are microscopically small and printed in yellow. They are called Tracking Dots or Yellow Dots or Machine Identification Codes (MIC).
The manufacturers don't inform the user about this implemented marking technology.
Back in 2005 the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) started an open call to collect printed material and set up a database.
In 2018 a research team from the TU Dresden developed a software that conceals the codes.
One year before, in June 2017, the American whistleblower Reality Leigh Winner was tracked probably by Yellow Dots that were found on her photocopies.
This website is part of the artistic research project "Between wild Rumour and a genuine Account". It aims to provide compiling data of the recent generation of color laser printers and color copy machines.



Weblinks:

EFF_Printer Tracking
TU Dresden_Geheime Daten auf dem Druckpapier
Wikipedia_Reality Winner
FAZ.net_NSA-Whistleblowerin zu Haft verurteilt
Unabhängiges Landeszentrum fur Datenschutz Schleswig-Holstein_Vorsicht: Yellow Dots!
SKD_Archiv der Avantgarden_Forschungsprojekt