From restaurant menus to the Olympics, QR codes are showing up everywhere. The handy "quick response" barcodes can pull upward a bill of fare, a payment system, or any number of websites and widgets on your smartphone. While they've been around since 1994, the pandemic prompted more businesses to adopt QR codes -- starting time every bit a safety precaution only now in other ways, such as for personalizing orders or tracking customer data.

Only as with any new advancement in technology, QR codes come with some downsides. Hither's what you demand to know if you lot use the barcodes in your business:

ane. Customers may have privacy concerns.

QR codes don't only allow you to save newspaper, they also let yous tap into additional tools for tracking and analytics. Some businesses, for instance, have used QR codes to build a database of customer guild histories and contact data, the New York Times reported recently. A QR code also allows business owners to encounter the timing, location, and frequency of each scan.

While such tools may prove useful to your operations, others ought to heighten questions as to whether using them is worth risking customers' privacy. More consumers in recent years are not only aware of how businesses use their personal data; they're willing to accept their dollars elsewhere if they know they're being tracked. A 2019 Cisco survey institute that 32 percent of consumers have switched companies over their data-sharing agreements.

As public noesis of the privacy risks of QR codes grows, businesses may risk alienating a growing base of more privacy-minded customers.

2. Minimizing homo contact is convenient -- but not e'er preferable.

While QR codes tin can save you labor costs past eliminating the need for additional employees to take orders or process payments, in using them your business volition miss out on vital customer interactions. For example, restaurant patrons who society from a QR lawmaking carte may be less probable to ask the waiter questions or less willing to try something unlike. Depending on the nature of your business, what you gain in efficiency might not exist enough to justify losing a cherished and useful way of interacting with your customers.

3. Cyber criminals are figuring out new means to commit QR code fraud.

The ability to accept cashless payments is a major benefit of using QR codes. Instead of employees physically treatment credit cards and payment machines, customers simply pay on their smartphone by scanning a QR code. But cyber criminals are creating fake QR codes and impersonating existent businesses in order to steal funds from unwitting customers or infect their devices with malware.

Unlike phishing emails or other forms of impersonating real businesses, fake QR codes are harder to find. A false QR code looks pretty much the same as a real bar code. Cyber criminals can direct customers to false payment websites by simply pasting a faux QR code over a real one.