I work in a medical office. Yesterday a patient saw a printer waiting to be disposed of after replacement, and she started spouting off about there being a ‘black box’ inside printers that stored copies of ALL documents printed – from day one on – and so we had to open the printer and find the black box to destroy it otherwise under HIPAA we’d be in deep doo-doo because patient info would be revealed… And she knew about this because she’d seen it on some news show recently.
I just nodded and told her thank you, good to know. :rolleyes: (She’s the greatest repository of woo type beliefs I’ve ever met.)
This particular rumor seems unbelievable to me for at least two reasons – the amount of memory that would be required and the fact that I’d never heard of it before. I mean, given all the articles I’ve come across about how to properly wipe computer hard drives and telephone memories and such, I just figure I would surely have heard this printer thing before if there was anything at all to it.
So – New urban legend? Did anyone else happen to see the ‘news’ story she referenced? Or did she simply hallucinate the whole thing. Which would not be unbelievable for this person.
Some Fax machines used a ribbon that would retain a "negative’ image of every fax received that was perfectly legible. If that ribbon wasn’t physically destroyed, anyone who looked at it could read every fax the machine had every received (since the last ribbon change).
It’s true that some high-end printers contain hard disk drives and those printers may be set to retain a copy of everything buffered. It certainly isn’t all printers though.
Let’s get one thing clear from the start, though. There are printers, and there are printers.
You little $150 desktop printer doesn’t store images. It doesn’t have the necessary storage capacity to do so.
The big office-style printers (usually printer/fax/copy workstations) basically have a computer built into them to control them, and that computer has a hard drive. These machines don’t “copy”. Instead, they scan and store the document, then print it. This means that the image is stored on the hard drive, and if someone had the technical knowledge to do so, they could pull the images back off of the drive.
CBS did a feature about this, so it’s not a woo site or some third-rate news source. Your woo lady actually has a legitimate issue this time.
As companies have become more aware of the privacy implications of the internal hard drive in a printer or copier, the vendors have built in tools to wipe the drive, after each print, at intervals, or before trade-in or other disposition. Some companies also have a policy to pull and destroy the drives when trading in the machine.
Agreed on the above. If you lease your printers, you should confirm that the lease includes provisions for wiping the drives when they come off lease. If you own them, you can hire a data destruction service to wipe them before you dispose of them.
Just to be clear, the CBS article seemed to be mostly talking about copiers and printer/copier multifunction thingies. (Which we do have, so I’ll pass the link along to the office manager.) But the printer in question is a Brother low end model, HL-5040. I don’t know what it cost. Would it fall into the ‘dangerous’ category?
Probably not. I didn’t watch the entire video report (yet), but it reminded me that every printer now, even the cheapest one, has a mandated built in secret code it puts on every document, so anything printed on it can be traced back to the printer.
This is done with yellow ink, which is why you can’t use a printer when it’s low on colored ink, even when you have plenty of black ink.
Thanks Big Brother, for making me buy colored ink when I don’t need it.
The data doesn’t have to be stored locally in a “black box”, waiting to be retrieved. Wouldn’t it be fair to assume that each and every copy is immediately sent to Maryland over the Internet?
There was a hard drive option for a HP laser printer I spec’d for our office. By the time we selected the other options (a duplexer and a 500 page tray) the price was getting high. So I skipped the HD option. The printer has internal memory for spooling anyhow.
the HD is more efficient. But as others mentioned could be a HIPAA concern.
Printers and photocopiers often have hard drives, quite often these have a quite unnecessarily large data storage capacity. This has caused an issue in the UK as printers/photocopiers used by government agencies have been disposed of without the hard rives being wiped and sensitive information has been recovered from the hard drives.
I’d love it if printers did contain a black box capable of storing all of the pages ever printed on it. I’d hack them out and use them for building servers, backing up all my data etc.
Printers also have a number of other rather nanny/big-brotherish features these days. Many will not print an image of currency, for example - they contain image analyzing firmware that detect US currency (possibly others) and either print a blank, a black rectangle or a pattern of bars across the image.
Many printers also print a nearly invisible “fingerprint,” typically in yellow toner or ink, that can be scanned and matched to a serial number, or at least to a comparison page, by LE.
Note that the Wikipedia page specifies color laser printers, which =/= all printers. Black-and-white printers only have black ink, and are thus unable to print yellow dots on anything.
