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.

Is somebody working on identifying these modern watermarks? A start would be to print out test pages and compare high resolution scans. Maybe also multiple printouts from the same printer to see what the natural variation is, and if there is a timestamp component.

I would start, but I'm currently not around a printer...

I suppose the approach is to create a machine learning dataset that maps hi-res scans of sample documents to the printers that produced them. If the resulting classifier can accurately id the printer, you have probably found a watermark, but it might just be natural variations in the manufacturing.