Old Cat, New Tricks
By Amit Asaravala
I've promised to be completely honest with you in this column, for better or for worse, so let me come clean about this: I liked the CueCat. Despite its many flaws and all of the bad press, the ugly little barcode reader captured my attention in a way that gizmos these days rarely do. Of course DigitalConvergence, the company behind the CueCat, nearly folded earlier this year after spending $250 million to distribute 10 million of the cat-shaped devices for free. But the barcode scanners themselves are still around&;#151;I have one in my desk drawer—and I'm still caught up in all that they stood for.
When Forbes magazine first sent out over 800,000 CueCats with the expectation that subscribers would plug them in to their computers and use them to scan special barcodes on magazine ads, the critics couldn't stop shouting. It's a case of a solution without a problem, they said. Then, the complaints began anew when smart consumers discovered that, with each scan, the CueCat software transmitted a unique identifier to DigitalConvergence's servers, which enabled the company to track the habits of individual users. This raised the ire of privacy advocates, and developers continued to modify and disable the tracking software with renewed cause. Finally, the grumbling reached a crescendo when hackers revealed a batch of users' email addresses insecurely stored on the company's servers.
I won't defend DigitalConvergence or its practices. The company made poor decisions: it tried to introduce a proprietary barcode format, the device barely worked, the license initially ignored privacy concerns, the software was full of unwanted advertising, and the actual product name—spelled :CueCat—was cringeworthy.
