[w33ble]

In my experience, most people don't even know what they are, much less know how to use them. The ads they are used in rarely give the user a reason to engage, so users also don't care.

The biggest problem I have with them is that they are a machine code representation of data, usually a URL, but almost nobody ever prints the human representation of that data. Makes as much sense as printing traditional UPC codes on the media. If marketers would place the short URL that the code points to, people might understand that that's where the code will take them, and they also then have the option of opening their browser and entering it by hand.

I still think that's unlikely to happen, of course, given how poorly marketers engage people, but at least it's no longer just machine code.

[sopooneo]

I think the URL the QR code references typically has some token in it that can be used in server analytic to tell which location the code was scanned at. You could reasonably get a person to type in the URL "BurtsApples.com", but not so easily "BurtsApples.com?refid=supermarket98".