Yeah, it’s not like you’re going to walk in and find flyers just sitting in your printer. If you automatically print out the Atlanta Journal Constitution every morning, it’ll give you local ads in place of ads for Fox Brother’s BBQ.

REALLY poorly worded “IP Sniffing”. It’s actually “IP Geo-location” since IPs can tell you roughly where someone is in the world. That’s how you get those “Meet a hot woman in tonight!” ads. It’s fairly routine.

Sniffing, to me, has a connotation checking out the ports on an IP address to see what services may or may not be running… which is a lot more shady.

I’m not entirely clear on the technical methods of “sniffing” (funny term, in my opinion) but what I understand is that this is a pilot program, HP & Yahoo are experimenting with new ways to deliver customized (and contextual – based on who you are, what you like, where you are, etc) messages/promos, etc with premium content through the printers. Ads/promos, etc. would not be sent automatically to your printer, think of how you print your boarding pass and there is a coupon offer included there, same concept. Also keep in mind that this is just a pilot – and there is nothing like this currently on HP web connected printers.

One of the reasons we’re testing this concept with customers is because HP / Yahoo wants to understand whether this would have appeal to HP customers and whether something like free premium content supplemented with a promotion or a coupon would be welcomed (think of a magazine or newspaper that you wouldn’t have to pay a subscription fee for). As I mentioned in my comment on the original post, the pilot is a phase in which HP can listen to its customers and if this program is rolled out more broadly, there will likely be opt-in choices, etc. to cater to individual customer desires. For what it’s worth, thanks for all of the comments and discussion.

If I wanted to use my money to support a large corporation, then I would buy its products, not allow it to continue to use the products that I buy from it for its own purposes after I have purchased said products.

I guess the best equivalent that I can come up with is paying BP for gasoline and then giving some of that fuel that I pumped back to them so that I could keep the pump running. Other than product support, our relationship ends when I walk out of the store with my product.

I am now shopping for a different printer product.

(expletive deleted)

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And I have a bridge for sale. If recent past is any indicator profit comes before everything, so Privacy my ass!

“Sniffing” only has a potentially shady overtone when you get to “packet sniffing”, which is sort of the net equivalent of phone tapping, and is what Google’s streetview cars are in trouble for in Europe.

I have an older HP DesignJet 650c which has refillable cartridges. You can actually refill later carts but they started designing the print heads to wear out after a few refills.

If I bought another printer I would probably buy a continuous inking system.

Yuh start sending ads to my printer, I will throw da mofo out da window and dat will be the end of dat!

Great machine.

“Ink for this printer is free, but at the end of every print job you get an ad” would be a model I’d be happy with.

“Ink for this printer is 10% cheaper because you get ads” would not – I’d assume that the non-ad carts were just made 10% more expensive, instead of my actually being saved money.

“Ink for this printer costs the normal amount, but we’ll let you print our ads on our FREE newspaper with it!” – would be just laughable. You’re paying your subscription in ink, and paying again by reading the ads. In these days of free web content, paying twice for similar content just wouldn’t fly.

For some unknown reason, our Credit Union purchased a few All-In-One printer/scanner/copier HP’s to give to our Telecommuting staff.

It’s probably the WORST idea IT management has ever made.

The Driver installations are like full on Malware.

HP Makes it hard to install just the driver alone, so you get like 2 Gigs worth of install, and god forbid you’re trying to help someone over VPN. It takes 2 hours to install the whole package/suite/driver.

As these do her printer polls ( in her case via dial up ) and pulls down whatever her extended family sends to a tightly controlled email address.

The HP account administration pages are straightforward and useful. So far she’s never received non-whitelisted email.

Through this we also subscribed her machine to a few publications – gardening, sewing, a daily SODUKU puzzle.

She loves all this. It’s easy for her and she gets photos and stories she wouldn’t otherwise get unless someone printed them at their house and drove over.

It’s worth the $$ in restocking her via Amazon ( much less than via HP as you no doubt suspect ) for paper and ink.

I always get a very positive vibe from companies that follow up concerns brought up on other websites. Sure, it’s often just a PR goon doing damage limitation, but to me it shows to me that they “get” it, much better than those endless companies that don’t.

When I’m recommending printers to clients in the past, I’ve generally gone for either HP or Lexmark. This article initially looked like a black stroke for recommending HP, but you’ve fixed that, and to me, it might just be a positive.

Though I’d still be leery of recommending people subscribe to printed periodicals this way, I can see how technophobic upper management (which seems very common) might get really turned on by the idea, and by spending 10p/page to print out your ads+free premium content, and spending their time to look at the ads, they might genuinely be getting something of value for free that they wouldn’t otherwise have got.

For normal people, I think my statement stands: they’d effectively be paying twice (once with time, ink, paper, and machine wear to print content+ads, and a second time with their time and eyes to view the ads) for the content that they could almost certainly get for less elsewhere.

For myself, I doubt I’m the target market, since I have no desire for ecologically unsound printed “premium content”. Far as I’m concerned, a printer is a thing I use very rarely, for pandering to those cretins who haven’t figured out the internet yet, who think signatures in biro are more impressive than digital ones, and who probably still have a fax machine. So long as my printer prints what I send to it, it’s doing the job I want it for.

But if it printed that stuff out on *free ink*, because it printed an ad for each N pages, before each real print? I’d totally be all over this product, and be recommending it to all my friends. While you’re waiting for it to print, you’ve nothing better to do than read an ad anyway, right? Captive audience for ads.

And some people might leave those ad-pages on their printouts when they handed them around, so the ads get better exposure.

I’m still waiting for a printer that doesn’t install 10 different useless pieces of hard-to-get-rid-of software that stays in my task tray.

No, dammit, I *don’t* want HP sScanPrintViewSoft to check for updates now!

Remember “Easter Island” (the native trees are extinct) that was minute compared to the damage these guys are perpetrating!

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More Spam, I thought there were Laws against indiscriminate Mail & Spam?

If these businesses cannot identify you then it is SPAM if they can identify you then Privacy, Data Protection & other Laws are likely to have been broken!

Lots of continuing discussion… I ended up posting more about this on the HP blog in case you are interested in reading: http://bit.ly/buLbxG

The important point to emphasize is that people who aren’t interested in this feature (once available) can simply choose not to use it. No one is suggesting that ads will be pushed in some subversive way without the customer knowing.

I think the pilot would help understand whether there is a way to deliver premium content that customers want at a “price” they are willing to pay. If you think about premium content in magazines and such, that is supplemented by ads. In the pilot, the customers could express how they would like to get premium content – and whether they would be ok with ads or a promo or some type of offer in the print outs.

Hope you will take time to read the post – it may clarify some things for you.

Thanks for listening… Liz

As with all new ideas (in this case, potentially a new model for advertisers and free content to customers), people are going to have opinions and thoughts. Thanks for sharing yours in such a constructive way!

I posted something on the HP blog that gives more info (http://bit.ly/buLbxG if you are interested), and I invite you and anyone else for further discussion either on the blog or even on Twitter. (I’m @LizAtHP).

Hope that helps and thanks for the discussion…

Thanks HP – all my printers have been HP since my Image Writer II for my MAC SE a billion years ago – you just gave me a sad face for this evening.

I’m sure over time they have improved the process and they can make more reliable print heads (for example the modern HP InkJet plotters have huge replaceable ink reservoirs) – but that is unlikely to trickle back into the older product lines. Those production lines are still probably building the pens the same way, using the same materials, as 15 years ago, and the pens have the same failure rate characteristics.

Not that I am trying to paint HP as benevolent. It’s more like they, like all of us, have to make trade off decisions.