DocuColor Tracking Dot Decoding Guide

How is a printer able to print those dots on so many pages? At some point, this special yellow ink must become depleted, right?<p>Or does it use the regular ink which is provided by the printer&#x27;s cartridge? If this is the case, isn&#x27;t a possible defense to just not buy new color cartridges? At least for me, I have to print colored documents at most every 3 months. Unfortunately the color cartridges dries out after about 6 months which means I would have to pay $20 to print less then 10 pages. Thus, I only buy the black ones and when I have to print something in color, I just put it on a USB stick and print it at work (I am allowed to do that in moderate amounts) or go to a shop with printing services and pay $1 for those documents.<p>Since my color cartridges are almost two years old (and still full according to my printer), though I cannot print a single page, am I still &quot;affected&quot; by those tracking dots?

Thanks you, EFF for giving us useful information about how the government and colluding corporations wish to track us.

I wonder if these are uniformly offset from the printed image, and if so, whether printers incorporate any protection to prevent the user from printing yellow dots near enough to them to mask the signature. (If so, it should be easy to make an extension to add such confounding dots to all printed material…)