Yes, it's very cool that I can print some protest leaflets or political posters, and have the police at my door the next day because "my" printer betrayed me thanks to a literal corporate-state conspiracy.
How do they even find you? Once they have your printer model and serial number, can they find the user?
I can see how this could be used to prove or disprove it was some suspect's printer, or if it was the same printer between documents. And that's already a lot. But somehow I doubt that they have the database of serial number to person.
For example you can pay with cash, and you can buy second hand.
The amount of effort required to track a specific serial number printer to its buyer means that the police are only ever going to get THIS involved if your protest leaflet happens to include original CSAM or snuff imagery.
Reading the dots and cross-referencing the serial number with credit card purchases doesn't seem like a lot of effort. In fact it seems extremely minimal.
There is no central database of printer->owner mapping.
There is not even a per-vendor database of printer->owner mapping.
To chase this kind of evidence a detective will have to a) find a technie to decode the dots for them, b) contact the printer manufacturer and ask if they can map a serial number to a retailer. c) contact the retailer to ask if they can map a serial number to a store. d) IF the store keeps a track of who buys which serial number, they can look that up, but otherwise e) ask for a rough data range of when that printer serial # was sold (query restock levels, etc, this MAY be doable via the retailer corporate level. and f) examine store CCTV if the printer was purchased within the X months that the store keeps their footage for.
It's at best a 3 day job, but in reality it will take a week for all the back-and-forthing with the various contacts, and there's a very very good chance that any one, or all, of the contacts will want a warrant.
It's not happening for a trivial 'someone posted a poster criticizing immigration policy', it might happen for a kidnapping (possibly if it's someone famous), particularly heinous CSAM user or rape, almost certainly for a murder or direct child abuse, and definitely for serial killers.
And all it takes for the whole week to be pointless is the criminal to buy a printer from a yard sale or somewhere else where cash can be used to buy a used printer.
