List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots

I wrote this article/originally created this list, and I would like to emphasize that there is a second generation of this technology that probably uses dithering parameters or something of that sort, and that does not produce visible dots but still creates a tracking code. We don't know the details but we do know that some companies told governments that they were going to do this, and that some newer printers from companies that the government agencies said were onboard with forensic marking no longer print yellow dots.

That makes me think that it may have been a mistake to create this list in the first place, because the main practical use of the list would be to help people buy color laser printers that don't do forensic tracking, yet it's not clear that any such printers are actually commercially available.

Could you elaborate/speculate on how dithering patterns would be used?

This isn't an answer, but I used to examine patents in this space. There are very advanced watermarking methods out there that are stable through transcoding, compression, obfuscation, etc. while being invisible to the naked eye. Really amazing stuff, wouldn't be surprised if there were lots of watermarks on media (audio, video, still image) that aren't readily apparent. One of the big use cases I remember was watermarking movies so that it would be possible to identify the time and place that a cam bootleg was recorded. That's a camcorder aimed at a movie screen and then heavily compressed and distributed over the internet, and the watermarks would still be detectable.

A simple, but reasonably robust solution to the cam problem is just to screw around with black frames, that is, the frames in the middle of a fade out. Give yourself 20 places where you can insert an extra frame and choose 10 to insert, and you already given yourself 40 bits to play with.

(It's trivial to deal with the audio sync issues.)

Cams may have a lot of spatial unreliability, but they have a lot of temporal resolution.

And that's just my stupid of-the-cuff answer, which is already off to a decent start. And there are in fact purely-spatial solutions that do work, to which the temporal solutions can be added. The upshot is don't expect to beat these anytime soon. There's just too many bits to hide in, and so few bits needed for the identification.

No. It's not that simple.

For a real example that really works, see, for example, digimarc:

https://www.digimarc.com/support/product/digimarc-guardian-f...

Images can be cropped, rotated, recompressed, scaled, etc. and the digital watermark remains.

Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digimarc

and read some of their patents, referenced in the Wikipedia article.