In Pune, a restaurant employee harassed a woman by taking her number from the QR-code menu. This incident has raised serious questions on the privacy of digital menus. The employee was fired from the job after the complaint.
A Pune woman has alleged that after visiting a famous restaurant on FC Road, an employee there misused her personal information. This incident has raised serious questions regarding the increasing use of QR-code menus in restaurants and customer privacy. A woman named Rishika Dutta shared her ordeal on Instagram earlier this week. In her post, she told that she had gone to the restaurant on April 28 and had scanned a QR code to view the digital menu. Later that evening, he started receiving strange messages from an unknown number.
According to Dutta, when they investigated, they found out that the person who sent the message worked in the same restaurant. He feared that his phone number had been extracted from the restaurant’s QR-based menu system. In the screenshots shared online, it was seen that the man was trying to befriend her and asking some personal questions.
Upset by this incident, Dutta demanded action from the restaurant management. He said that soon after the complaint was filed, the restaurant informed him that the employee had been fired from all branches. However, he also claimed that the management neither made any formal apology nor provided any written evidence of his termination.
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In response to the allegations, the restaurant apologized for the incident in a public post on social media and said “immediate action” had been taken. The business also stressed how important customer security and privacy is to them and promised to improve internal processes to prevent such incidents in the future.
people reacted
Many users on social media criticized restaurants’ increasing reliance on QR-code menus and raised concerns over security and privacy. A user asked where is the privacy in this digitalisation race and why are customers being forced to provide phone numbers, which are often linked to Aadhaar.
Another user said that he has stopped eating in restaurants where paper menus are not available. He termed this fad of going digital as unnecessary and intrusive.
A third user claimed that a similar incident had happened to her at a restaurant in a mall in Navi Mumbai a few years ago. She said that despite filing an official complaint, she was harassed and eventually stopped visiting the place. She further said that women do not feel safe in such situations.