Still Seeing Yellow

Recently, the EFF reported that the European commission had responded to a request by European Parliament member Satu Hassi about tracking dots in printers. European Commissioner Franco Frattini replied that tracking dots may constitute a human rights violation saying that:

"..to the extent that individuals may be identified through material printed or copied using certain equipment, such processing may give rise to the violation of fundamental human rights, namely the right to privacy and private life. It also might violate the right to protection of personal data."

Intriguingly, the request text includes a mention to and link to the Seeing Yellow project I started last year as an example of the fact that consumers have complained to printer manufacturers and that these complaints have fallen upon deaf ears.

Everyone who called their printer manufacturer in response to Seeing Yellow deserves come credit for the raised visibility to the issue that we’ve created and the set of actions that have brought the issue this far. Please, keep it up! If you’ve not complained to your printer manufacturer, visit Seeing Yellow and call today.

3 Replies to “Still Seeing Yellow”

  1. “Follow our instructions and call up your printer maker. Ask them to stop using tracking codes and demand that they tell you how to turn it off.”

    No thank you.

    “The Secret Service can’t come and question all of us!”

    And you have verified this how? Do you want to be put on some type of potential yellow dot monitoring list of radicals? Why waste the time of an important agency on this matter if they do investigate such requests?

  2. @Mike:

    I hope that one day you’d stop thinking this is simple paranoia and start realizing this is serious social problem—as serious as tracking of typewriters in the Eastern bloc (a la “Das Leben der Anderen”) in order to suppress dissent.

    Hopefully, that day won’t be the day your voice was silenced because the government was able to track you down through one of these methods that you dismissed.

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