Do you know what’s in your QR Code?

The web continuously costs money to run, so every website you visit is trying to pay the bills one way or another. If the website is doing a free task for you make sure there aren’t any hard-to-spot strings attached. QR Codes can be a modern bait and switch which trip up even tech savvy individuals and businesses.

Here’s how QR Code generating websites get their hooks into unsuspecting users. There is a mismatch between what users think they are getting vs what some websites provide.

People think when they put in a website URL into a QR Code generator they are getting that exact URL encoded into the QR Code. Since most people can’t read QR Code’s they just have to trust the website didn’t do anything sneaky. Unfortunately many websites send the QR Code to their website, that way they can charge you after a “trial period” to keep the code pointing to your final destination.

Sometimes people want to redirect their links through an intermediate step (and there can be benefits), but that should be chosen explicitly with costs explained all up front.

So what can you do?

Before you print a QR Code in any reasonable quantities, double check what is in the QR Code with a reader which gives you the real text output and doesn’t instantly redirect you. Scanning with your phone to test is not good enough.

Simple QR Code Maker is your trusted tool for making and reading QR Codes. It will never do a sketchy redirect like many of the web QR Code tools. The app is free (always and forever) and open source on GitHub so give it a try and let me know what you think!

Joe