Printer yellow dots are small dots that encode identifiable information into all printed pages. This has been used since the 1980s to track people.
There is a tool called DEDA to anonymize these and prevent tracking.
It would be nice to include this in Whonix/Kicksecure to protect whistleblowers and such. It would mainly be useful for Whonix host.
Tails is looking into including this.
https://lists.autistici.org/message/20200306.003951.1880c4b4.en.html
There has been some criticism by the MAT2 developer.
https://lists.autistici.org/message/20200308.154747.1b4d1245.en.html
Unfortunately, the way DEDA works is working, from my understanding, is by calibrating itself on “known bad” documents, meaning that it doesn’t provide a generic solution.
A better solution would be to render the documents in black and white, since the yellow marks will likely be rounded to white, but this will make non-textual documents barely usable/readable. Like pdf-redact-tool ( GitHub - firstlookmedia/pdf-redact-tools: a set of tools to help with securely redacting and stripping metadata from documents before publishing ) is doing.
Maybe I should add such option to mat2, behind a
--paranoidflag?