In Australia, where QR codes have been put to widespread use for COVID contact tracing, the police have already tapped into these treasure troves of personal information.
In recent years, we’ve seen how information collected by prayer apps has been used to target and surveil Muslim Americans, and how location information of devices has been used to surveil people protesting for racial justice. And your personal information collected by companies can be shared with or accessed by the government for surveillance. While that hopefully could never happen in the United States, if the codes become pervasive enough, an advertising-based equivalent could certainly arise. In China, this technology has been used to create a network of mandatory checkpoints used to track citizens as they moved throughout society. There is an entire industry dedicated to using these and other technologies to identify you - precisely - so that a visit to a restaurant can be connected to all your other tracked activities to create a detailed profile of who you are, where you go, what you do, and your interests and habits. Plus, as your phone opens the website or app, all the terrible privacy practices of our current online and mobile environments come into play: cookies, your phone’s advertising ID number, and device fingerprinting. In fact, companies that provide QR codes to restaurants like to brag about all the personal information you are sharing along with that food order: your location, your demographics such as gender and age group, and other information about you and your behavior. But many of the QR codes you see in restaurants are actually generated by a different company that collects, uses, and then often shares your personal information with other companies. Sometimes it just opens the restaurant’s web page. You may not have thought much about what actually happens when you open your phone and click on a QR code at a restaurant. Manipulating us into scanning QR codes instead of ordering from a physical menu is a way for these companies to achieve their dream of online-offline tracking by inserting all the machinery of the online advertising ecosystem between you and your food. These surveillance capitalists have long wanted to link online profiling to our physical movements to pry even further into our private lives. They try to collect information about every click we make online and package it into profiles to be shared, sold, and used in ways we couldn’t even imagine, as seen in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In the past decade, technology companies and the advertising industry have created a vast and extremely lucrative online spying apparatus. Businesses are taking advantage of the rise of touchless services during the pandemic to harvest massive amounts of sensitive information about who we are, where we go, and what we do, including our eating and drinking habits - when all we want to do is just eat a meal. If you’ve been to a restaurant lately and scanned a QR code rather than order from a physical menu, you likely paid for that meal with not just your money, but your privacy and security too.
0 kommentar(er)
