Blog: David Loshin

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Encoded Printing, Privacy, and Business Intelligence

This morning, I read a very interesting story about how there must have been some apparent interactions between government folks and printer manufacturers that resulted in the embedding of encoded information on printed pages. This message, embedded as a series of yellow dots only visible using a magnifying glass and blue light, was determined to be a digital signature used by the US Secret Service to "prevent illegal activity," (probably money counterfeiting).

From a privacy point of view, it is always jarring to hear about ways that activity is being tracked without the target's awareness, but those of us in the Business Intelligence world know that there are many ways that individual activity may be (and probably is) being tracked. And sometimes, people even are happy to "be tracked," if it results in money savings or better efficiency. I am sure that there are many sideline privacy "activists" that participate in supermarket "clubs" or frequent flyer programs.

The question I want to throw out to the blogspace is: where is the line between beneficial tracking and invasive tracking?

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