QR Codes Are More Than Digital Menus

Several trending articles over the last year have cropped up maligning the ubiquity of QR codes, most prominently by Erin Woo the New York Times
NYT
. The little black punctuated squares almost seemed self-replicating with their proliferation in an era of pandemic and its accompanying collective aversion to fomites and non-sanitized contact surfaces. From restaurant menus to payment portals, they have become a mainstay, almost necessitating a smartphone for everyday interactions. However, the recent backlash on QR codes is not based on their ugliness or impersonality, but rather privacy concerns as profiled in Erin Woo’s NYTimes piece and clarified in a Washington Post piece by Tatum Hunter. The concern on privacy shows the power of QR code utility, ubiquitous internet networks, and contextualizing a digitized identifier in time and space.

Quick reference codes are indelibly associated with embedding a URL, but in actuality they are just one among many “data carriers” i.e., a mark or device that encodes an identity and other attributes. Data carriers are so commonplace that they blend into the mundanity of everyday objects, such as 1-dimensional barcodes encoding Universal Product Codes on almost every consumable product. This mundanity occurred in response toward machines’ needs for contextualizing objects, whether at the point of sale or as products move through a supply chain. It is a testament to QR codes’ utility that they have made the jump from business purposes to everyday life.

Invented by Masahiro Hara at Denso Wave (a parts supplier for Toyota) in the early 90s and approved by major standardization bodies as a data carrier, it is unique in its international uptake and interoperability [Yann Rousseau in World Crunch conducts an excellent interview with QR Code’s inventor, Masahiro Hara]. Created for its omnidirectional, error-correcting, and flexibility in character encoding, it has proved reliable for many use cases, making it an excellent standard data carrier. Indeed, depending on which type and size used, a QR code can be readable with up to 30% degradation and encode up to 2,953 bytes.

Where do QR codes play a role in food technology and safety? We come back to the original concern: how is the usage of a QR code interacting with identity? Data carriers are digital infrastructure which resides in our physical reality. Barcodes transformed the retail experience from summing the hand applied price stickers to the “beep, beep” speediness of today. The reason for privacy concerns, as stated by Hunter’s piece, is that the URLs embedded in QR codes carry the baggage of the current web, namely cookies and tracking software. It’s not the data in the QR code itself, other than the web address, it’s how that unique address is associating with your personal data.

This illuminates the actual crux of QR code ubiquity. Not only is it bringing about a unique identity but leveraging the infrastructure of the internet to convey “linked data”. New standards and initiatives, such as GS1 Digital Link or Sunrise 2027, epitomize this cyber-physical infrastructure. Now not only can you obtain product information through a private network, but dynamic lookup, using the identifiers within the QR code can show custom information and experience or even take advantage of each web visit of the identifiers to better traceability, all accessible through the World Wide Web. Through the advent of data collection on a reading device, it can broadcast the physical action into cyberspace.

Gs1GS1 Digital Link

The future of QR codes in food products are based on the choices organizations make regarding web privacy and by the developers who enable their use, especially taking advantage of linked data. Yes, there can be invasive practices about consumption behavior, but alternatively you could use a linked identifier to see where a product was made or whether it is subject to a recall. QR codes are only a tool, but as we have seen with other digital advances, data is ultimately identifying, either through direct means or through analytics.