(photo from CNS)

Since the social media and micro-blog have been popular among the public, people can get various information every day. It has been discussed for a long time that the 2-D Bar Code on Chinese new version of train ticket includes confidential personal information. It is said some people may abuse those personal information for criminal activities. 

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An engineer, Tao Yong, who is responsible for developing 2-D Bar Code, said the 2-D Bar Code has the capacity for storing more information comparing with the traditional bar code. And it is easier for machine to read and difficult to copy the code. 2-D bar code is an encoding method. People may notice there is a code at the back cover of the book; it is called the traditional bar code. The disadvantage of traditional bar code is that it only includes numbers.

The journalist put a 2-D bar code under the camera of the phone, and ran the process like "Let Me Check", "One Step Scanning", and "Fast Shot of The 2-D Bar Code". There was no personal information appeared. Does it mean the personal information has been protected? According to Tao Yong, the personal information will not be saved in the 2-D bar code directly. The information will be calculated in a certain way so that the sequence of number will be generated.

It seems that the camera of the phone will not detect the personal information. So would it be possible for some specialists to steal the personal information via special tools? The journalist talked to a chief officer of the Ministry of Railway. He explained to us the Ministry of Railway has protected this information and blocked the pathways so that no one can access the personal information. Nowadays, the Ministry of Railway has applied the latest technique to protect this information. However Wang Hua suggested it is better to keep the tickets rather than throwing them away in public place in case of abuse.