This isn’t necessarily bad. It is made so forgeries can be detected.
Halfway competent criminals know how to prevent it. But at the same time, I am simply against any and all non-consensual tracking.
I have a similar stance on this as DRM.
It’s how Reality Winner got real fucked.
via Wikiedpia:
Both journalists and security experts have suggested that The Intercept’s handling of the reporting, which included publishing the documents unredacted and including the printer tracking dots, was used to identify Winner as the leaker. In October 2020, The Intercept’s co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald wrote that Winner had sent her documents to The Intercept’s New York newsroom with no request that any specific journalist work on them. He called her exposure a “deeply embarrassing newsroom failure” resulting from “speed and recklessness” for which he was publicly blamed “despite having no role in it.” He said editor-in-chief Betsy Reed “oversaw, edited and controlled that story.” An internal review conducted by The Intercept into its handling of the document provided by Winner found that its “practices fell short of the standards to which we hold ourselves”.
A technology that was made To Stop Criminals™ being used against a political whistleblower? Color me surprised! (thanks for sharing the link btw, didn’t know about that)
You’re very welcome. It’s good to be able to show real-world examples so people are less skeptical. A lot of people won’t read a deep technical document describing printer surveillance, but they will read a paragraph excerpt from Wikipedia.
And they will argue that whistleblowing is actually a crime, because, uhm, it’s, uhm, yeah it’s illegal! And if it’s illegal to be a good citizen, then this is totally warranted and no scandal at all, because only bad people do illegal things!
Many people are willing to sacrifice a lot of people for the tiny chance of maybe stopping a criminal once.
