I just have read about microdots in a thriller book. Those are little yellow dots hidden in printouts that tell the printer’s serial number and printing time. I thought that can’t be true. But I researched it and found out it’s true
I’m a bit shocked about this.
Yes, that’s one reason you can’t print a black and white document if you don’t have a color cartidge in the printer. It wouldn’t be able to tag it then.
There are other “fun” things, for example some software will not allow you to print copies of banknotes: EURion constellation - Wikipedia
More reasons why open software and hardware is important…
Damn, there goes another of my get-rich-quick schemes.
More seriously, this is just another reason to adopt FOSS, and no doubt there are others that we don’t even know about.
Two of the best books about the then future (our present) were Brave New World and 1984. They got one thing wrong, but an awful lot of their predictions were right.
What they got wrong was that in the West, it was private companies, not the state, that were the controlling entities. They never imagined Facebook and Google.
I often wondered why I can’t print with only a black catridge and always thought it must be because they want to force me to buy color catridges to earn more money.
Thanks for that explanation,it’s much more shocking than I thought.
Seriously,is there anything left on this planet that doesn’t want to grab my data? 
Squirels : )
That’s not to get your datas, it’s to prevent mean people to print bank notes and destabilise the economy. At least, that’s what they said.
This allowed me to learn that playing with moneys in stock exchange, is not being mean and is not destabilising the economy. Even if it put whole countries in crisis and most people in these countries unemployed, it’s legal. The question about morality of how you got that money will even disappear when you will support the good candidate at next election.
Well, I would reconsider this …
If you read Hitchhickers of the Galaxy you would know really the whole planet was built for request of aliens - the tiny little mouses . They wanted to now THE ANSWER. so they had have a solar system scale emulation to know the answer.
So they also wanted “our data” and more … 
Also dolphins know about dismantling of Earth … so …
Who knows what squirrels wants to know about us ?.. ;))
I’m not so sure about that. At least in the case of the printer things, the state is very much in control and asked the companies to do this.
As for Google and Facebook, the NSA is certainly very happy to get all the data from them. So in that regard, they act as a smoke screen so people don’t notice too much that the state is in control of everything…
Anyways, let’s not talk too much of politics here, it’s not the point of this forum!