BE CAREFUL!!!OF THIS PRINTER THAT SPY'S ON YOU

How tech wizards cracked the mysterious code that turns your printer into a spying toolSpread throughout the pages were barely visible yellow dots , each less than a millimeter in diameter , repeated over and over in the same rectangular pattern . You could see them by zooming in on the pages and adjusting the color.Or , if you had the original printed papers ,you could have inspected them with a magnifying glass and a blue LED light .

They’re called tracking dots or microdots.
Nearly every color printer on the market is
equipped with a feature that covertly prints
them.They encode any page that comes out of a printer with a serial number, date and time that can be interpreted using a simple cipher.

Printer manufacturers are not required to tell customers the feature exists .Although the FBI has signaled otherwise,some experts have speculated that such dots may have helped investigators track down and arrest Reality Leigh Winner,the government contractor who was charged by the FBI.

             

In This technology is one way that governments secretly pressured industry to change products to undermine privacy and anonymous speech when the law did not require it.This should make us all wonder how else the government is working in secret to undermine privacy and speech.

We should insist that companies be transparent about how government requests have affected the design of the products we use, since those designs can have profound implicationsAuthorities have not said whether the yellow dots on the pages of the NSA document leaked to the Intercept helped lead them to Reality Winner.If anything,court documents suggest that the FBI traced the leak back to her using other means,including computer logs.But cybersecurity experts said finding whoever printed the document would have been an easy task using the tracking dots.

This technology is one way that governments secretly pressured industry to change products to undermine privacy and anonymous speech when the law did not require it.This should make us all wonder how else the government is working in secret to undermine privacy and speech. We should insist that companies be transparent about how government requests have affected the design of the products we use,since those design can have profound implications

sources & Credits to:

https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots

http://www.instructables.com/id/Yellow-Dots-of-Mystery-Is-Your-Printer-Spying-on-/

WHY GOOGLE IS SUDDENLY OBSESSED WITH YOUR PHOTOS

Right now the company is feasting on photos and videos being uploaded through its surprisingly popular app Google Photos. The cloud-storage service, salvaged from the husk of the struggling social network Google+ in 2015, now has 500 million monthly active users adding 1.2 billion photos per day.

At the company’s annual I/O developers conference, Google touted Photos as a signature platform getting a bevy of valuable updates. Users will soon be able to automatically share all their uploaded photos with a loved one, or filter which specific photos are auto-shared by date or topic. A new Suggested Sharing feature will use facial recognition to prompt users to send photos of their friends directly to them, similar to Facebook’s Moments app.But the question remains: Why is Google offering such a feature-rich product that doesn’t appear to be readily monetizable, outside of the few print photo books the company plans to sell?

The simplest answer is that the company wants to keep people within its all-encompassing ecosystem. Today’s tech giants now offer to serve as caretakers to our digital lives across a suite of services in exchange for access to our personal information.Even if Google doesn’t make any money directly from something that it offers, it’s still gathering data.What more data could Google possibly need? The search giant has effectively achieved its longstanding goal of “organizing the world’s information,” if you consider only the written word. But even cofounder Larry Page has acknowledged .

Google Photos, especially now that it’s been fine-tuned for sharing, is a back door into the social networking and chat functionalities that Google has been trying and failing to pitch to customers for the last decade. While we allow the company to passively track us through platforms like Chrome and Maps, Google Photos may be the first Google product that persuades people to actively share their personal information with the company and the masse since Gmail.These are powerful breakthroughs that seem likely to accelerate the pace of technological change. But it’s important to remember they are being spearheaded by a company whose primary objective is to sell targeted advertising. 

Once a Google product has gone through enough iterations vacuuming up enough data to feel like a human necessity, it inevitably must also become a money spigot, whether it’s in the form of promoted destinations clogging up Google Maps or your Google Home playing a Beauty and the Beast commercial unprompted.A photo album used to be a photo album. Now it’s a searchable database that is self-aware enough to infer human relationships.

 What will it be tomorrow, and who will pay for it? That’s the question to ask whenever Google or one of its peers shows off a new, too-good-to-be-free product.Sergey Brin says that Google wants to be the third half of your brain. But now think about it: Do you really want the third half of your brain to make a living by showing you ads? I don’t.