FTC Targets Copy Machine Privacy Concerns

itwbennett writes "In a letter to US Representative Ed Markey, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said that the FTC has begun contacting copy machine makers, resellers, and office supply stores to inform them about privacy concerns over the images that can be stored on the machines' hard drives and trying to 'determine whether they are warning their customers about these risks ... and whether manufacturers and resellers are providing options for secure copying.'"

Re:There machines don't need hard drives.

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

There's plenty of reasons. We use them to store oft-printed forms, scanned images, and a pretty staggering array of things in between. Maybe what you meant is that there is no reason to store an image in non-volatile memory if it has not been specified by the user.

Yes they do need hard drives.

[Colin Smith]

You put a stack of papers into them, hit the copy 10 times button. It has to print 10 stacks of papers. You want to stand there shoving the paper through 10 times while it does it?

 

You're kidding?

[U8MyData]

This has been an issue ever since they started pasting PC's on the backs and sides of copiers. What is that now? Something in excess of 10 years?

Re:Is there a law?

[Lehk228]

regulation of interstate commerce.

unless you would like to suggest that copy machines are in fact manufactured and sold all within a single state.

Re:Windows

[Todd Knarr]

Easier option: the copier deletes the files from the hard drive after the copy run's completed and the images aren't needed anymore. Ditto when documents are scanned and delivered elsewhere (eg. e-mailed to the user). Only store them permanently when the user scans them in and deliberately stores them in the copier. It's not that hard to make it behave that way.

What about the dots?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Of course they don't give a damn about the serial numbers that each copier embeds in every page they print. [eff.org]

Re:Yes they do need hard drives.

[pclminion]

1 GB of RAM alone can store a huge number of scanned pages. Given the cost of commercial copiers, having them contain 16 or even 32 GB of RAM wouldn't affect the cost very much.

For black and white documents, definitely true. Supposing 600 DPI, an 8.5x11" page of bitonal data (1 bit per pixel) takes up 4207500 bytes. If you just stopped there, you could store 255 pages per gig, which isn't a terribly impressive capacity... But using a compression method like JBIG2 which can give upwards of 50x reduction for single pages and even more than that for multiple pages, you're now talking about 15000, 20000 or more pages per gig.

However, pointing to the price of RAM at the present time is a bit dishonest, since copiers have been around since earlier than a few months ago... I don't remember the price points from five years ago, but I bet if in 2005 you went to a manufacturer and said "Why don't you just stick a gig of RAM in there" they'd fall over and die laughing. Yes, it's a possible solution NOW, but we're not talking about NOW.

Re:About time...

[laughingcoyote]

And this kind of rent seeking behavior for things that should be getting done anyway, is the exact type of thing that leads to the regulations that will shortly be forthcoming here (hopefully, in this and many other scenarios).

It's amazing to me how many corporations fail to act with a fundamental level of decency and do the absolute minimum possible in terms of customer service and quality (or sell reasonable levels of those as a "premium service"), then howl and scream when people find that unacceptable and put regulations in place that require them to do what they should've been doing anyway. It amazes me more that anyone would defend that type of behavior.

If companies really want to stop hostility and regulation toward them, they should open a dialogue (a real one) with their customers, in terms of what they want, what they will pay to get it, what is negotiable, and what is not. Especially as choices become fewer and fewer, a lot of larger companies seem to think they can get away with anything and shrug off the loss of a few customers. At that point, the only option left is regulation. One way or another, the customer's going to be king, and you better treat him accordingly. Squeezing every nickel out you can is anything but.

Re:There machines don't need hard drives.

[GIL_Dude]

Well, we use them with HP printers all the time. Any confidential document is "printed" to the printer with a code selected by the user. The job won't print until the user is standing at the printer and enters the code. With current technology on the print servers, this requires the printer to manage it and have a hard drive. We also use Smart Cards on the HP printers for some functions (such as scanning and sending to email). That function either requires it store to RAM (might be a lot of RAM required) or to a hard drive as well. Both of these are functions used on our office printers at least weekly if not more. They certainly aren't used for every job, but they definitely are used.

I was at a conference three weeks ago where the subject of "self encrypting drives" (the ones with encryption in the drive firmware) came up and one of the other people representing a large business there mentioned that he buys those drives for his printers and that they use them. So there are use cases where it makes sense.

Re:About time...

[swb]

A conversation about what they want?

The vendor wants what everyone *wants* -- a new Mercedes every 2 years, not flying coach, a boob job for his wife AND mistress, and you to pay for it.

How hard is that to understand?