Loading player Not that they were ever completely gone, but QR codes have been back for some time. On the menus of restaurants and, above all, in the Green Passes that are talked about so much. For QR codes, two-dimensional barcodes, it is a kind of revenge: because while in China they have been used for years with profit and consistency, in much of the rest of the world they seemed, until before the pandemic, an outdated technology and outdated, which was about to disappear even before it really took root.
QR codes are back, again, after being often abused by advertising and sometimes even derided for their apparently little use: now those squares to be framed with the camera have proved to be very useful in a context in which almost anyone has a smartphone with a camera and a good internet connection, and where the fewer things everyone's hands touch, the better for everyone. “Their time has finally come,” wrote Quartz, and it is an “unexpected revenge of a widely maligned technology”.
So there seem to be reasons to believe, as the New York Times among others noted, that now “QR codes are here to stay”. But that's not really true, given that it is already the third time that, outside of China, their time seems to have finally come. And that's not necessarily a good thing either, given the wide tracking possibilities they offer to those who create and control them. Certainly, however, before arriving on restaurant tables and in the green certifications of 2021, they took a wide and strange tour.
QR codes were invented in 1994 in Japan, because Toyota needed a quick and easy way to track and monitor the moving parts of cars on its assembly line. The company then asked its subsidiary Denso Wave, which was and still deals with integrated systems, to think of something that could be simpler, faster and more powerful than the one-dimensional barcodes developed in the 1950s by some US students. and after subsequent improvements used in stores all over the world.
Masahiro Hara, who at the time was a young engineer of the Denso Wave, took care of the project that led to QR codes, who recently said that he did not expect in any way that those cryptograms – small encrypted messages capable of containing a lot of information in a small space – they could make sense even away from an assembly line.
Unlike codes with horizontal bars and other two-dimensional systems that already existed, QR codes (where the two letters stand for “Quick Response”) had two important peculiarities: some squares were not there to contain information, but to help the devices that had to frame them to do it better and faster. To decode the information they contained, then, normal sensors were enough, not scanning tools such as those still in use in supermarkets.
QR codes are an evolution of barcodes because in such a space they can contain much more information. The vertical lines of a two-dimensional barcode can replace just a few tens of digits or characters. QR codes, on the other hand, can contain a few thousand, and to obtain them you just need a digital camera, which thanks to a series of signs in the code can transform the image into a link. In fact, in most QR codes there are three squares on the corners, the purpose of which is to help the camera align with the image. A fourth square, a little more centered on the last corner, then helps the camera to understand the size of the image and the angle from which it is being framed.
All the other smaller squares instead do something similar to what vertical bars do in barcodes: they contain the information necessary to open a particular link. QR codes can contain up to a maximum of about 3 KB of data. If you want to use it, it is also possible to learn how to decode a QR code “by hand”.
Through links, therefore, QR codes (which exist in different formats, static or dynamic) can lead to any type of content, and can be used in various contexts. And there is also the possibility of creating QR codes that are aesthetically a little more creative than those to which many are accustomed: in fact there are also some that are artistic in their own way.
In the second half of the 1990s, and even more so in the early 2000s, QR codes came off the assembly lines and spread to other sectors and contexts with relative ease, certainly aided by the fact that the Denso Wave, which in fact still controls the relative patent freed up the license for their use, which for some years remained mostly industrial.
Thanks to their undoubted potential and as a consequence of the arrival of the first smartphones with integrated cameras, new and interesting opportunities opened up for QR codes. In their own way, those squares were in fact possible points of passage from the real to the virtual world, a sort of simple anticipation of augmented reality. Many QRs ended up in magazines, often in advertisements that invited readers with smartphones to frame them to go further and read more, online. Some others ended up on buildings, clothes and objects and in very different places, with different purposes from time to time: “every surface can now become a portal to digital content”, as the marketing site ClickZ wrote.
At the end of 2011 the New York Times wrote: «as well as the big black boots, during the last fashion week the 'Quick Response (QR) codes' were everywhere». The article talked about cookies with QR code, buses with QR code, mannequins with QR code and even bracelets on which those who wanted could put their own QR code. The QR codes also ended up on some graves and, as documented by the site “WTF QR code” (defined as “a definitive compendium of a sad and horrible technology”), in a whole series of places and objects where apparently they did not make much sense.
Despite a general enthusiasm for them, the QR codes failed to break through. Partly because many of their uses seemed forced, ephemeral and in the interest of companies rather than users; but perhaps above all because the general context was not yet ready. QR codes were in fact comfortable and quick in theory, not much in practice: a decade ago internet connections were worse than today, and so were cameras. And above all, to scan those codes there was a dedicated app to download, choosing from the many existing ones (not all equally safe and effective).
While for some companies it might be interesting to try to put a QR code on a subway, for many commuters it made very little sense to pick up the phone, open the app, frame the code and hope for a sufficiently steady hand and a sufficiently stable connection to open. then who knows which link.
Shortly after appearing to be the future, QR codes already seemed to be the past. “They are a technology that desperately wants our attention,” wrote Gizmodo, who called them “occasionally useful but very often cumbersome and ineffective.” As Quartz recently recalled, “they became a joke, something that was talked about to refer to lazy and deceptive marketing strategies.” And Scott Stratten, author of the book QR Codes Kill Kittens (“QR Codes Kill Kittens”) said they became “the Jurassic Parks of marketing,” which is something that companies used because they could, without thinking if that was actually the case. to do it.
Things seemed to change again in 2017, when the iPhones first and the phones with Android then made it possible to scan QR codes directly from the cameras, without having to download other dedicated apps, with all the small but decisive waste of time and inconvenience. that the thing involved. “QR codes are not a failure of the past, they are the future” wrote Wired in 2017, “this time for real”.
In reality, however, even that important novelty did not contribute much to making the use of QR codes really widespread, common and more or less daily.
At least not in the West. Because in China, on the other hand, for some years both AliPay and WeChat had made possible their use within their respective apps – both very popular in the country – and where already in 2017 it is estimated that more than half of the population had used them for at least one digital payment. Apparently, QR codes arrived in China just when it was needed: that is, when the spending power of a significant part of the population had increased, but was not inclined to use cash. In a country, among other things, where the highest denomination banknote, the 100 yuan one, is worth just over ten euros.
As early as 2017, Chen Yiwen, a scholar of consumer behavior, spoke to the South China Morning Post about the possible “dawn of a codeconomy”. A year later the same newspaper found that QR codes had now “conquered China” and spoke of the phenomenon as a real “financial revolution”.
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Gradually, the relevant uses also increased in the rest of the world, in particular for online services that require double user authentication, for example both on the smartphone and on the computer, like many home banking sites. But it is above all with the pandemic that QR codes have found new and urgent uses: to provide links instead of restaurant menus, but also for more important issues related to payments (for example, PayPal has been allowing payments with QR for a year now. code). In some countries QR codes have been used for contact tracking and in many others, including Italy, for certifications that allow you to travel and do various other things, the so-called “Green Passes”.
Again, therefore, the time for QR codes seems to have come. If they continue to spread, among other things, it is likely that they will return to talk about security and privacy issues: because it is relatively easy, to give the simplest example, to use them to get someone to a link other than the one expected, and containing a virus; and because – as happened in China in the last year – they allow us to implement what the New York Times has called “a troubling precedent for automated social control”.
