All,
This is a followup on our privacy and PII discussions from the March 13, 2025 conference call... Please feel free to respond and add any feedback/comments/pointers and I'll use the discussion to prepare slides for the May 2025 F2F.
Thanks!
"printer-serial-number (text(255))"
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This Printer Status attribute provides a unique identifier for the printer hardware that is often used when providing support. The privacy concern is that it could be used with other information to accurately identify the owner(s) and/or location(s) of the printer.
This attribute is defined in PWG 5100.11-2024: IPP Enterprise Printing Extensions v2.0 (EPX), which makes it REQUIRED for enterprise printers. As a status attribute the value is generally considered immutable, however an implementation might provide a way to update the value out-of-band for service personnel to retain the original value when replacing a key component of the printer.
Based on our discussions I will tentatively be updating the IPP Everywhere 2.0 specification to make this attribute CONDITIONALLY REQUIRED for printers conforming to 5100.11 and RECOMMENDED otherwise. We will continue discussions at the May F2F as part of the IPP Everywhere session.
"printer-uuid (uri(45))"
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This Printer Status attribute provides a unique identifier for the IPP Printer object (service). Like the "printer-serial-number" attribute, the privacy concern is that it can be used with other information to accurately identify the owner(s) and/or location(s) of the printer. Unlike the "printer-serial-number" attribute, the value is supposed to change after a factory reset (although not all vendors do so at this time...)
This attribute is defined in PWG 5100.13-2023: IPP Driver Replacement Extensions v2.0 (NODRIVER), which makes it REQUIRED for all printers but doesn't clearly state the "change after factory reset" requirement that is implied by the fact that a factory reset effectively creates a new instance of the Printer object with factory default settings. (I'll take the blame for this - we tried tightening up the semantics from the 1.0 document but missed this important aspect...)
Based on our discussions I will tentatively be updating the IPP Everywhere 2.0 specification to make the "reset after factory reset" behavior clear. We will continue discussions at the May F2F as part of the IPP Everywhere session.
Additional Points to Discuss for PII
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- Look at GDPR and other privacy regulations as they relate to different Printer attributes.
- Update the IPP Privacy Attributes v1.0 registration?
- Potential future errata for 5100.11 and 5100.13.
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Michael Sweet