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I've worked at one of the printer companies in the article. Someone in my weekly meetings merely gave the weekly report "I worked on project XXXX" for a year. I

I've worked at one of the printer companies in the article. Someone in my weekly meetings merely gave the weekly report "I worked on project XXXX" for a year. I'm not censoring him: he censored himself and just stopped giving details about his project, including the name of the project. I suspect he was working on currency constellation detection, not these tracking dots, but that's roughly how it plays out. Is anyone reluctant to do this work? Hell, no; that stuff is really cool to work on. And the moral dilemma is more limited than you might realize. Frankly, given enough time, a printer company could identify a printer from a printout without these dots, down to its manufacturing batch (you could confirm the specific printer if you had access to the printer itself) and date of printing (down to a couple days or weeks, depending on how long ago it was). The dots just make it automatic instead of painstaking.

noja 9y ago
> The dots just make it automatic instead of painstaking. Just? You just described the difference between surveillance and automated mass surveillance. Economies of scale.
teddyh 9y ago
It took me several re-reads of your comment to realize that your colleague literally wrote “I worked on project XXXX”, with actual X’es.
- cam_l 9y ago
  Maybe he didn't self censor, maybe it was just the printer.
Zak 9y ago
> The dots just make it automatic instead of painstaking. That's significant though. Something that's painstaking only gets done if someone thinks there's a specific, targeted reason to do it. Something that's trivial and automatic gets used broadly without any individualized suspicion unless there are legal limits on doing so. We don't have the sort of clear ethics rules in tech that doctors, lawyers and engineers have, but if we did I think one of them should be that tech should not intentionally work against the interests of its user or owner. That means introducing surveillance features into a printer without telling the buyer they're present is unethical. Using a tracking feature as a selling point, say, to allow an organization to identify the origin of a leaked document is another matter.
Paul-ish 9y ago
I said this elsewhere[1], but its not immediately obvious that you can identify printers via machine learning. Classification gets really difficult when you have millions or billions of classes. Accuracy tends to fall off a cliff. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14508048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14508048

noja 9y ago

> The dots just make it automatic instead of painstaking. Just? You just described the difference between surveillance and automated mass surveillance. Economies of scale.

teddyh 9y ago

It took me several re-reads of your comment to realize that your colleague literally wrote “I worked on project XXXX”, with actual X’es.

cam_l 9y ago
Maybe he didn't self censor, maybe it was just the printer.

Zak 9y ago

> The dots just make it automatic instead of painstaking. That's significant though. Something that's painstaking only gets done if someone thinks there's a specific, targeted reason to do it. Something that's trivial and automatic gets used broadly without any individualized suspicion unless there are legal limits on doing so. We don't have the sort of clear ethics rules in tech that doctors, lawyers and engineers have, but if we did I think one of them should be that tech should not intentionally work against the interests of its user or owner. That means introducing surveillance features into a printer without telling the buyer they're present is unethical. Using a tracking feature as a selling point, say, to allow an organization to identify the origin of a leaked document is another matter.

Paul-ish 9y ago

I said this elsewhere[1], but its not immediately obvious that you can identify printers via machine learning. Classification gets really difficult when you have millions or billions of classes. Accuracy tends to fall off a cliff. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14508048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14508048