Warning (Added 2015) Some of the documents that we previously received through FOIA suggested that all major manufacturers of color laser printers entered a secret agreement with governments to ensure that the output of those printers is forensically traceable. Although we still don't know if this.....
“(added 2017) Reminder: It appears likely that all recent commercial color laser printers print some kind of forensic tracking codes, not necessarily using yellow dots. This is true whether or not those codes are visible to the eye and whether or not the printer models are listed here. This also includes the printers that are listed here as not producing yellow dots.
THANK YOU FOR THE YELLING OF THIS INFORMATION. I CLEARLY WOULD HAVE OVERLOOKED IT LIKE FAINT YELLOW DOTS BUT YOUR CAPS HAVE HELPED ME BETTER APPRECIATE THE CONTENT.
True story: I bought my current printer from a homeless man. I had actually found the printer in a box that someone had left on the curb across the street the night before, so I knew it wasn't stolen. I was going to take it home but was walking away from home at the time and didn't get a chance that night. The next day I saw it with the homeless man across the street and offered to buy it.
Yes, assuming your printer has a black cartridge. (Otherwise, it's because it legitimately needs all the colors to reconstruct a shitty black -- I don't know if they still make printers like that, though.)
It has a link to the App that decodes, what being embedded in the print and anonymize the prints, by scrambling the yellow dot patterns.
https://dfd.inf.tu-dresden.de/