If you’ve been to a restaurant lately and scanned a QR code rather than order from a physical menu, you likely paid for that meal with not just your money, but your privacy and security too. Businesses are taking advantage of the rise of touchless services during the pandemic to harvest massive amounts of sensitive information about who we are, where we go, and what we do, including our eating and drinking habits — when all we want to do is just eat a meal.

In the past decade, technology companies and the advertising industry have created a vast and extremely lucrative online spying apparatus. They try to collect information about every click we make online and package it into profiles to be shared, sold, and used in ways we couldn’t even imagine, as seen in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. These surveillance capitalists have long wanted to link online profiling to our physical movements to pry even further into our private lives. Manipulating us into scanning QR codes instead of ordering from a physical menu is a way for these companies to achieve their dream of online-offline tracking by inserting all the machinery of the online advertising ecosystem between you and your food.

You may not have thought much about what actually happens when you open your phone and click on a QR code at a restaurant. Sometimes it just opens the restaurant’s web page. But many of the QR codes you see in restaurants are actually generated by a different company that collects, uses, and then often shares your personal information with other companies. In fact, companies that provide QR codes to restaurants like to brag about all the personal information you are sharing along with that food order: your location, your demographics such as gender and age group, and other information about you and your behavior. Plus, as your phone opens the website or app, all the terrible privacy practices of our current online and mobile environments come into play: cookies, your phone’s advertising ID number, and device fingerprinting. There is an entire industry dedicated to using these and other technologies to identify you — precisely — so that a visit to a restaurant can be connected to all your other tracked activities to create a detailed profile of who you are, where you go, what you do, and your interests and habits.

In China, this technology has been used to create a network of mandatory checkpoints used to track citizens as they moved throughout society. While that hopefully could never happen in the United States, if the codes become pervasive enough, an advertising-based equivalent could certainly arise. And your personal information collected by companies can be shared with or accessed by the government for surveillance. In recent years, we’ve seen how information collected by prayer apps has been used to target and surveil Muslim Americans, and how location information of devices has been used to surveil people protesting for racial justice. In Australia, where QR codes have been put to widespread use for COVID contact tracing, the police have already tapped into these treasure troves of personal information.

When restaurants make owning a smartphone and being able to scan a QR code the default for being served a meal, that also has significant implications for equity. Many people do not have a smartphone, including more than 40 percent of people over 65 and 25 percent of people who make less than $30,000 per year. People with disabilities and the unhoused are also less likely to own one. These are some of our most vulnerable communities.

QR codes can also pose security risks. A QR code transfers data directly into your phone that you can’t read, and it could trigger an action that you can’t scrutinize before it happens. That’s an inherently risky thing to do, like blindly clicking a link in an unknown e-mail. Depending on your operating system, QR code reader app, or the QR code itself, you may not get the chance to inspect the proposed action, or you might be distracted or hungry and take the action without considering it carefully. Some scammers have been known to put their own QR code sticker over a legitimate QR code, redirecting anyone who scans it to a subtly different payment target, or to a website that hosts malware. Some QR code software is not trustworthy, and an honest but naïve business may inadvertently steer people to a malware site. Even a legitimate URL can be repurposed by an attacker if the website gets compromised or its domain name expires.

Whether technology helps or harms us depends on its purpose, the people who build it, and how we control and use these technologies. Based on current privacy and security risks of QR codes, we recommend that people:

• Treat any QR code like a link in an unknown email: Be wary and pay attention to the context in which it appears.
• When not certain a code can be trusted, consider seeking the information another way, such as by manually navigating to the business or organization’s website.
• Use software that allows you to inspect the QR code or the action it will take before it is passed to your browser or any other app.
• Keep an eye out for any QR code that has been pasted on top of another one.
• In restaurants, continue to use a physical menu. We now know that it’s highly unlikely to spread the virus by touching a piece of paper.

With the privacy threats, equity concerns, and security risks of QR codes, no business should require anyone to scan a QR code or make it difficult for people to continue to use a physical menu if they want one. COVID has already cost our communities so much. Now is the time to make sure that any technology we use is working for us, not putting more of our personal information and power into the hands of companies who profit at our expense.

On any given day across the country, millions of Americans have had their drivers’ license suspended — not because of unsafe driving or other safety concerns but because of a government imposed debt they can’t afford to pay.

It doesn’t have to be this way. State and local governments can and must end taxation by citation — and right now Congress has a chance to help them do it.

The Driving for Opportunity Act, introduced by Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), is bipartisan legislation that provides grants to states that do not suspend, revoke, or refuse to renew a driver’s license of a person or registration of a motor vehicle for failure to pay a civil or criminal fine or fee.

By helping states cover the costs of reinstating driver’s licenses previously suspended for unpaid fines and fees, the Driving for Opportunity Act would encourage states to do the right thing, and it would give millions of Americans the opportunity to have their driving privileges restored. Right now, the bill is awaiting action by the Senate Judiciary Committee — and there’s no time to waste.

Taxation by citation is a pernicious system, and it works like this: State and local governments create frivolous regulations as predatory money-making schemes to fund government services. For instance, nuisance regulations like loitering, beautification regulations like lawn maintenance requirements, traffic regulations like bans on tinted windows, or quality of life regulations like bans on sleeping in public. The sheer number of regulations, which have no bearing on public safety, make it very likely that someone will run afoul of one of the many finable offenses at some point in time — especially if they live in Black and Brown communities that are already subjected to over-policing.

A person in violation of any one of these unnecessary codes is then slapped with a fine and a bevy of administrative fees, which can then escalate into hundreds or even thousands of dollars. When that person can’t afford to pay their debt, the government suspends their driver’s license. This exposes them to even harsher penalties, including arrest and incarceration, when they have no choice but to drive on a suspended license.

A recent ACLU report documents the pervasive practice of using driver’s license suspension as a consequence for unpaid fines and fees. These burdens are borne disproportionately by Black and Brown communities, fueling a vicious cycle of poverty and criminalization.

The fact is that in most of America, driving isn’t a luxury — it’s a necessity. The majority of people living in the U.S. don’t have access to public transportation and rely on driving to get to work, school, religious services, court obligations, and medical appointments. People whose licenses have been suspended are often left with no choice but to drive and risk criminal consequences, making it even more difficult for them to pay off their debt.

State and local governments should not be funding their operations through law enforcement, period. But they do, and it’s nonsensical and counterproductive.

First, debt-based license suspension is not an effective collection tool. Taking away people’s ability to get to work doesn’t just make it harder for them to pay off their initial debt, it also has ripple effects throughout the economy — reducing family incomes and destabilizing communities.

Instead of protecting public safety, debt-based license suspensions undermine it by diverting resources away from important community services and priorities. In 2019, Minneapolis City Attorney Mary Ellen Heng told the Minnesota legislature that her prosecutors spend about 30 percent of their time enforcing these suspensions that have no bearing on public safety.

Worst of all, using courts and law enforcement officers as debt-collectors enables over-criminalization and exacerbates racist policing practices. In Texas, 95 percent of arrest warrants issued in 2016 were for unpaid fines and fees, and more than 640,000 people were jailed as a result.

In Durham County, North Carolina, 80 percent of those with suspended licenses were people of color, mostly Black Americans, and the average time they had lived without a license was 11 years. In New York City — where driving on a suspended license was the fourth-most charged crime in 2018 — 76 percent of drivers are white, yet 80 percent of people arrested for driving on a suspended license in 2018 were Black or Latinx, according to the Fines and Fees Justice Center.

For Black and Brown communities, the practice of debt-based license suspension can be deadly. When Daunte Wright was brutally killed by police in Minnesota, it was during a traffic stop that stemmed from unpaid fines and fees.

Fortunately, more and more states are recognizing the harms of this costly and counterproductive practice. Ten states have already ended debt-based license suspensions, and Congress can encourage more to do so by passing the Driving for Opportunity Act.

Now, this legislation has bipartisan support in Congress and from groups across the political spectrum, including Americans for Tax Reform, Americans for Prosperity, the ACLU, and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Curbing debt-based license suspensions is a common sense opportunity for Congress to advance racial justice and our economic recovery. They shouldn’t wait to seize it.