The Universal Product Code aka the barcode celebrates it’s 35th birthday this month. The first ever official ‘swipe’ took place on 26 June 1974 at a supermarket in Ohio and with barcodes being swiped around 10 billion times a day, their use is now synonymous with 21st century life.

Not everyone liked the barcode when it first came out and there were plenty of people bandying conspiracy theories about how government’s could track people using barcode. However barcodes have helped millions of businesses over the last three decades with a Price Waterhouse study showing that retailers had saved around $17 billion on grocery products alone thanks to the humble barcode.

As with most technology, as times change, the technology has to adapt and move on and so it follows for the barcode. RFID tags (Radio Frequency Identification tags) are touted as the next big thing as they no longer need to be scanned. In fact, checkouts could soon be a relic of the 20th century as shoppers could potentially walk through a sensor station that worked out your basket’s contents and charged you according to the signal output by your mobile phone.

Labelled under the EPC category (Electronic Product Code), these tags are far more effective than barcodes as every product can have it’s own unique ID, making tracking and stock levels far easier. EPCs have enough power to tag every grain of sand in the world with their own unique number, such is the power and depth of the EPC.

And EPC’s aren’t just for retailer purposes either. There are plans to integrate further information into the tags meaning consumers may be able to scan an EPC with their mobile phone in the near future and get further instructions on the product such as nutritional information, manufacturing origins, cooking information and other related facts.

The one big question over EPCs is how secure they are and how easy they will be to hack. There are also potential privacy concerns as scanners in shops or shopping centres would be able to scan the contents of people’s bags and adjust advertising and marketing according to what the devices scan.

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