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What a trainwreck of an article. The tracking is allowed by URLs, not QR codes. The title might as well have been 'Written text is here to stay. So is the tracking it allows.'.

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Except an ordinary human can't decode a QR code, so you will only know after the fact.

The device you scan the QR code with will ultimately deal with it, as it would if you had clicked a hyperlink in the build in web browser. So if your device blocks tracking tech (cookies etc) then you'd be fine. There's no difference here between a QR and clicking a link though.

My phone always asks me "do you want to open somewebsite.com in the browser?" when I scan a QR code.

At that point, it hasn't even made a request to that website, so I _will_ know beforehand what I'm opening.

iOS's bult-in QR code detector, and others I've seen, only show the domain name of the code. To opt out due to tracking parameters, you have to be shown the full URL. To attempt removing the offending parameters, you need the option to copy the URL to the clipboard or otherwise get it into a text editor rather than simply requesting the URL in the browser.

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