this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2025
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Boycotts✊📣

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Using your consumer power to refuse to feed the profits of adversaries of humanity. Marketplace baddies who cause disproportionate harm to the planet or people.

Who to boycott, why they are being boycotted (or why you personally boycott them), and how to boycott them (if it’s not obvious).

Also welcome: discussion on how to organize and track your boycotts. E.g. whether it’s a special tool or app, or whether it’s a series of text files to GREP.

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Boycott Canon and Xerox for surreptitious yellow tracker dots (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org to c/boycott@lemmy.sdf.org
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Most (if not all) color printer makers are printing unique tracking dots on every printed page. But some of them are transparent about it and disclose it to consumers.¹

In any case, in the mid-1980s Xerox and Canon developed the anti-consumer feature decades before it became known to the public in 2004. So certainly we can blame them for surreptitiously assaulting our privacy.

It’s the surreptitious element of this that is the most infuriating. Transparently disclosing the feature to consumers is the socially responsible approach because at least informed consumers know they are signing up for:

  • reduction of print quality
  • higher cost of consumables (more yellow consumption)
  • loss of privacy
  • inability to print a black document when yellow ink/toner is empty

Xerox and Canon should be boycotted not just for the anti-consumer feature but for concealing it.

¹ citation needed.. I don’t recall where I read that some printer makers are transparent about it. I would like to know which ones are transparent just from a standpoint of knowing where the integrity is.

Update- other threads on this topic:

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[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It's both, since the 90's. I worked in a print shop, the commercial copiers of the time (which are the same tech as printers) would copy a bill, but the colors would never be right, though photos were flawless.

I'm not providing a source - this was all well-known by the mid-90's, some of us were there and experimented to try to get around it.

The steg is for traceability, not to prevent duplication of currency. It's so you can show that a particular doc came from a specific printer. This has uses far beyond currency.

Not that I like it, it's just not news.

[–] evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I’m not providing a source - this was all well-known by the mid-90’s,

The citation needed is not for what you’ve said here, but for the claim that ALL printers do it without exceptions, despite lack of regulations requiring them to do so.

some of us were there and experimented to try to get around it.

Did you witness any Oki printers using stego? Note Oki printers are no longer on the US market, but when they were I regarded them as the most ethical of all options. To date I’ve seen no one catch Oki doing stego.