Recently, I've stumbled to Rob Cockerham's "Introducing the Eyeclops: Super Magnifying Camera" page. Rob really has fun with his amazing 200X toy; Eye Clops Bionic Eye. He did some try outs with casual living room materials; magazines, shirts, hair, etc... After that, he unveiled secret yellow dots on printings (by the way; he used to have print shop job, also).
The issue is that many printers embed some tracking information into the printouts. The embedded information contains date, time, serial number, etc... (enough for watched by big brother). The information is encoded and printed by yellow dots (not viewable without magnifying) across the page. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reported decoding method and sample implementation on this page.
The first printer that I purchased in 1995 was HP 690C. I remember that it had been mentioned as not to be able to print dollar($) green tone. That can be evaluated as reasonable limitation. However, a printer that spying on its owner is really inappropriate for me. I think that we all deserve little more privacy and we should prefer the printers do not embed tracking dots to purchase. In this respect, EFF's list is very handy resource; "List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots".
(Image source: http://www.eff.org)
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