Hello! Happy Holidays! I’m interested in finding a good inexpensive color printer (jet), scanner, fax, etc for my Librem 14, that is privacy honoring, whose ink cartridges last a while. Any suggestions? Would love it if I could hear any suggestions before midnight central, while it’s still “Cyber Monday” or after ( : Thank you!
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My household uses a Brother DCP-L2550DW with the TN-760 High-Yield Toner Cartridge, which is estimated for 3,000 A4 pages. Other Brother printers with colour capabilities, along with their respective cartridges, will likely be sufficient for your use case.
What specifically does “privacy honoring” mean in the context of a printer, and do you have information to share regarding the privacy properties of this printer? Most printers are simply opaque regarding their privacy.
For example, I run my own DNS server and I can see my printers doing periodic DNS lookups, which is often a bad sign from a privacy perspective.
Hence, if you don’t need to use the printer from outside the local network and you aren’t too bothered about having the printer update its software, you might want to deny the printer all access to the internet.
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The household printer itself is monochrome, so it does not strictly satisfy the full criteria. However, I do know a few things about it:
- No proprietary drivers required for usage over LAN with Linux.
- Ink cartridges last a while.
The printer is mostly used for schoolwork and monthly employee payrolls, and the ink toner cartridge just got replaced today after being sporadically used for over a year.
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OK, fair enough. I interpreted the question as being more about the printer itself.
An anti-feature as far as printer privacy goes is any printer that has a hard disk on which print jobs are queued i.e. internally to the printer. However that is generally incompatible with “inexpensive”.
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At the moment, the household printer is configured and connected to the LAN using Wi-Fi, but it also has a USB-B port in the back that can be used for printing via USB cable as well, so it is possible to avoid potentially exposing printing jobs to the LAN by only using the latter method instead for improved privacy.
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Pursuing that further … when I jump on one of my printer’s management pages, it is accessed via https - hence good that it is protecting stuff from exposure to the LAN but bad that it’s a self-signed certificate.
Edit: It is possible to put a real certificate on the printer but I haven’t bothered. So I guess the capability of doing that is useful from a privacy perspective.
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It is better to have a self-signed certificate than no certificate at all.
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Teletype Model 28 ASR!
(Just use your audio jack and a demodulator.)
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Let’s broaden this a bit: printers are known to print identifying marks on prints (yellow dots) it seems unconfirmed that there is something similar used in laser/grayscale as well. And I’m not sure if this is still going on (a bigger thing about this was around a decade or more ago). See: Printer tracking dots - Wikipedia At the end of that article there are a few links to countermeasures, but I’m not sure how user friendly those are to implement. The Instructables/EFF article is good too: https://www.instructables.com/Yellow-Dots-of-Mystery-Is-Your-Printer-Spying-on-/
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Same links on my WIkiless and Structables instance:
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