This whole thread has got to be among the most, shall we say, eyebrow-raising ones I've ever read on HN. It has everything from "just drive 20 minutes to 2 hour

This whole thread has got to be among the most, shall we say, eyebrow-raising ones I've ever read on HN. It has everything from "just drive 20 minutes to 2 hours to the next town to print a couple pages" to "just don't be poor" and "why do you even print". ;-) But disregarding the staggering amount of unwillingness to look any further than one's own nose, everyone considering printing on a public / shared printer should know one this: I can guarantee you that a copy of anything you output there gets saved. Not just statistics & metadata (page coverage, timestamp, copies...) but an actual picture of the page (at least as a thumbnail), regardless of what anyone will tell you. Even if the feature is not turned on for compliance reasons and gets collected by a central server, it will be stored on the printer's internal hard drive at least until the next maintenance cycle and can be retrieved for a significant amount of time. If you pay by card or connect to it with your phone and thus add another level of personal data, you might as well just put it up on your Facebook publicly and ask anyone to print & mail it to you. Modern commercial printers (such as those you will find at larger offices or at Staples) are basically full-blown PCs with a scanner and laser unit attached to them and as such nothing you put through there is ephemeral by default. It also means they are vulnerable to all kinds of horrible exploits that pretty much never get patched. Almost nothing stops you from refilling a $30 inkjet with generic ink cartridges at $5 a pop (even cheaper, although messier, if you refill yourself). Or, if you print more, by all means, get that $100 mono laser. But "just go for a drive and print at Staples" has got to go on that wall of worst HN ideas ever.