For many years, forensic investigators have been able to match typewritten documents to typewriter they were produced on. They can do this because every typewriter has a unique signature – the “a” might print slightly above the other characters for example.

(For those readers who are under 20 years old, typewriters can be found in the Google Museum: http://images.google.com/images?q=typewriter)

And as for being tech savvy… I’m pretty sure I picked that up from reading the manual that came with the printer. It’s not just color printers that do it, either, I’m pretty sure all laser printers do.

It seems odd that it’s just now getting attention.

Whether or not there is any real threat anywhere, in even more public non-technical places, for identity theft, stalking, spying, etc.–the fact of the matter is that there isn’t much information spread about it.

Again, not dissing the technology–just the lack of communication of it being put into use in the first place. And of course there isn’t much personal information from the serial numbers themselves, but the technology can be used to embed OTHER information besides the serial numbers if properly implemented, right? Anyway, I’m conspiracy theorising now, so I’ll bow out.

I really don’t see an iminent threat, but it’s good to be aware.

As for personal information… what? the serial number on the printer? that’ll help the police establish which printer it was printed on… it’s not like it’s transmitting your credit card numbers and favorite sexual position over the internet. It’s a serial number attached to a piece of hardware… and unless maybe you registered the printer (how many people actually do that?), there’s not a shred of information about you tied to that serial number, anywhere. And if you’re worried about it… just buy a used one somewhere and pay cash. Or don’t register it. whichever.

I don’t see this as being significantly different than the stuff they put inside guns to mark the bullets. If you’re hunting or target shooting or whatever… no one’s going to care, and any bullets anyone picks up, at most they can read a pattern on it that shows what kind of gun it came from… and nothing else. If they find one of the bullets inside a body, and find a gun at your house, they can fire a bullet from the gun and see if the patterns match. Ditto with the printer. They’re going to have to look at the printer to get the serial number off of it to compare, and no one’s going to have access to do that unless there’s probable cause.

If you want to worry about sensitive information being passed without your knowledge, there are plenty of things out there that do that already (and your non-tech friends probably have dozens of them on their own computers).