Do You Trust Me?

I work in the online advertising industry. We use QR codes quite frequently. If you don’t know what  QR code is, it is a new kind of bar code type thing that anyone can generate. It can contain a web address, a text message, text, phone number … so it can be just about anything. You scan it with your smart phone and it will take you to the web address or show you the text. They are useful for contests, info, advertising etc etc. The problem is, you don’t know what they are bringing you to until you scan it. I read today on Cnet:

“Approximately 14 million U.S. mobile users in the U.S. used their smartphones to scan QR codes in the month of June 2011 alone, according to a new report from ComScore.”

It is usually a product demonstration video or a web site to sell you something. Pretty innocuous stuff. What if though …

If people were to be devious, they could make QR codes, plaster them somewhere and bring you anywhere. They could bring you to a site with a virus, a site that could crash your phone, a site that had bad information. Who knows what they could be. I think we are all being too trusting as a society. All the new technology can still be used by old time thieves, nogoodnicks and neerdowellers. We as a modern peoples are too trusting of things that we see. We blindly do what we are told and it really has to stop. Think about what you do before you do it people!

If you are wondering what a QR code is, I have placed one below. If you trust me … click on it. I dare you. I promise nothing bad will happen.