DEDA: The Toolkit That Exposes and Erases Your Printer's Secret Tracking Dots
DEDA – Tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation Toolkit
DEDA is an open-source toolkit for extracting, decoding, and anonymising the yellow tracking dots that most commercial colour laser printers secretly embed in every printout. It offers a GUI and CLI tools to read tracking data from scans, compare documents to identify a specific printer, extract unknown dot patterns, create custom tracking dots, and remove tracking data from both scanned images and PDFs before printing. The project is based on a 2018 ACM IH&MMSec paper.
This means that almost every printout contains coded information about the source device, such as the serial number.