>Or would the state come down hard on any such manufacturer?

Remember what happened to the Quest CEO when he refused to allow his company to spy for NSA?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/09/30...

  Just one major telecommunications company refused to participate in a legally dubious NSA surveillance program in 2001. A few years later, its CEO was indicted by federal prosecutors. He was convicted, served four and a half years of his sentence and was released this month.

The real problem with that is that consumers have communicated, quite clearly, that privacy is not a significant concern for them.

I'm not sure that's the case. Things do need to be printed because of arcane situations where paper still reigns supreme. Copy centers are not always accessible and sometimes are more costly in terms of travel and cost than the cost of ownership of a printer. Plus the yellow dots are not as ubiquitously known as I take your post to indicate.

It's hard to really buy with your wallet when you don't even know you have a reason to be cautious. Similarly, it's been suggested that boycotts and "vote with your wallet" are woefully ineffectual nowadays.

It's not that consumers don't care, it's that most don't have a choice or aren't even aware of such a need

It isn't the role of the public to regulate business. It is literally the role of the government to regulate business. Blaming your fellows for failing to stop multinational corporations in their endless search for more dollars is short sighted and as we have seen doomed.

While some market is there, making such a printer (hardware and firmware) would be non-trivial. Manufacturers did a lot of research to print well, and making even black and white printer of comparable quality may be very hard.

Most inkjet printers are cheap nasty bits of plastic - which is why the paper path works so badly and either jams or doesn't grab sheets reliably. It wouldn't require much engineering to build something better.

Print heads are a more of a challenge, but you can buy manufacturer originals and build a printer around them.

The firmware is a big problem, but there's a lot of research in the public domain that could be repurposed.

After all of that, you need compatible ink. You'd be reliant on third party ink clones and cartridge systems.

It wouldn't necessarily be harder than a 3D printer project, but it's not trivial, and it would be hard to make it work financially.

Given a choice between an official printer that costs $35 to buy and $60 for replacement inks, and an OpenPrinter that costs $60 to buy and $35 for inks, most people will buy the former.

I suspect that the company would get a visit from the secret service

The default assumption should always be that everything is backdoored, _especially_ these "privacy-first" products

That's why it would need a software equivalent of nothing-up-my-sleeve numbers, i.e. open-source firmware.

There's still Trusting Trust, but that's rather harder to pull off.

Interestingly, there's not even a section for printers in that list.

Yes, there is no single printer that respects your rights.

> This list is no longer being updated.

Yeah, and it says everything tracks now and dots are not the only way. That was my point.

that's terrible advertising I'd expect the secret service to come just to mock our pretensions

our biggest client just wants a offline ios printer driver for bouncing previews to Acrobat via the share option. ios so far off our path.. this client would talk about any OSS driver deal for commercial rates in fact they definitely don't want any unique driver to profile... we're totally lost to find resources we can understand or resources at all. for a business to thrive with critical necessities hobbled I think there's always a central crime like how drugs and spectacles frames prices shown constant price for 30 plus years.. something artificial is happening with pressure applied.