alt Hacker NewsAnd even spookier: Tracking.
If items have unique (ie serialized) codes, then it's safe to assume that those codes will be recorded at purchase (since that's kind of the whole point), along with who bought them (yay discount cards and cashless society).
Now the contents of my pantry describe things like where I've been, when I was there, and/or who I hang out with. Fun times!
Even with cash and without discount cards: One random food label out of a recycling bin can relate all the way to photos of the purchaser's face at checkout, track them walking to their car, and see where that car went. This could happen months or years down the road.
Most of those pieces are already in-place: Our photos are already recorded alongside of our transaction details -- that's been going on in POS world for a long time. Tracking people to their vehicle is a function of Avigilon camera systems. Tracking the car itself is the primary purpose of Flock.
All that's missing right now is serialization records and a centralized database.
I'm sure that nobody will ever finish fitting these things together into a cohesive system and that nobody would ever use it with ill intent.
It probably would never happen anyway, since there's not a single retailer on Earth who would ever exchange this kind of data for an upgrade to their in-store surveillance systems and a monthly check. ;)
(And we still don't get directly-useful consumer information into or out of these new 2D barcodes. I love losing.)
This is already the case. Virtually every single food product comes with an expiration date label - which includes some kind tracking. You pretty much need to have that to do any kind of sensible recall when there's yet another poop lettuce outbreak. Looking at my pantry it usually seems to be include kind of lot number, time of production, and/or production line identifier.
I reckon they already have a pretty reasonable idea of which store it ends up going to, and with just-in-time resupply a pretty reasonable bound of when it will end up having been sold. Look at the overlap of a few dozen products and it should be quite easy to reduce the number of people who could've bought all of them to just you.
The QR codes just make this more explicit, and slightly easier to track. You're not wrong, but at least this time we could get, say, automated warnings in the Walmart app of a recall on something you bought out of it.