A few weeks ago a company called Digital:Convergence Corp. began giving away a small bar-code scanner called the CueCat at Radio Shacks around the country, as well as to mailing the scanners to subscribers of Wired and other magazines.
The CueCat is based on a pretty good idea — embed barcode style tags in print publications. Sweep the tag with the bar code reader and up pops a web site related to whatever the printed material is about. Marketers could use the CueCat, for example, to embed links to specific product web sites in advertisements for those products.
The major problem with the current round of such services is this: they’re all proprietary systems owned by a single entity which causes all sorts of problems. In the case of the CueCat, for example, each scanner has a unique ID and the users is required to give log-in data to a Digital:Convergence Corp. web site, meaning Digital Convergence has the capability to track very detailed information about an individual’s behavior with the CueCat (see ZDNet’s Will privacy kill the CueCat?). Of course they promise not to, but we’ve seen a number of broken promises from companies about privacy. Personally the benefit of the CueCat is marginal compared to the privacy risk (many users confidence in Digital:Convergence Corp. wasn’t enhanced when one of their servers got hacked and the company didn’t even realize it — somebody outside the company discovered and informed the company about the situation).
The good way to do this would be to build this as a standard into web browsers. Have an independent standards body write a method of encoding URLs into bar codes and then have Netscape, Microsoft and others simply incorporate that into the browser, letting the user decide which bar-code scanner he or she will use (and if they can afford to give these away free, the cost can’t be too high).
That would be useful. Giving me a consumer data collection scheme disguised as a helpful peripheral is not.