Byjackie snow

(These tech changes could make your next flight safer.)
“We know minute by minute how many people are passing and where they are going,” Simone Venturini, Venice’s top tourism official, told the New York Times. “We have total control of the city.”
Amsterdam, which also struggles with overtourism, tracks how visitors use Amsterdam’s City Card, a flat-fee pass to museums and public transport. Beach Check UK launched this summer with real-time information on how busy dozens of beaches are along the English coast, guiding travelers away from packed areas.
“Technology can be used to collect data in order to both make better decisions and communicate those decisions,” says Christopher Imbsen, director of sustainability at World Travel & Tourism Council.
UV-C cleaning
Hospitals have used UV-C light to disinfect and kill viruses for more than two decades. Now, indoor public spaces including airports, gyms, and movie theaters are adding UV-C to halt viral spread.
“UV-C is having its heyday right now,” says Peter Veloz, CEO of UltraViolet Devices, which makes UV disinfecting technology.

An employee on a LATAM airplane monitors a UV-C dispensing robot in early 2020. The technology can kill viruses including COVID-19 if used properly.
PHOTOGRAPH BY NELSON ALMEIDA, AFP/GETTY IMAGES
UV-C has germicidal properties that combat COVID-19 and other nasties, both in the air or on surfaces. Depending on the location, new UV-C installations go into HVACs, on escalator handrails, or through airports and planes via light-equipped robots that disinfect as they go.
If installed and operated correctly, a UV-C system can kill all sorts of bacteria and germs. Even seasonal flu bugs might be zapped before they spread. “COVID-19 could come and go, but what won't disappear are normal pathogens,” Veloz says.
QR codes at restaurants
In the early days of the pandemic, when transmission of the COVID-19 wasn’t yet well understood, restaurants hurried to provide QR codes. The little black boxes of pixelated dots and dashes could be scanned with a smart phone to bring up a menu, let you order from it, and then allow you to pay your bill, all with limited virus-spreading interactions with servers.
While earlier fears that people could catch the virus via menus and other surfaces have been disproven, the codes have proven convenient and will probably stick around, especially with late-pandemic worker shortages.
Such convenience might mean a trade off with privacy, however, since the little codes can potentially gather a large amount of information from users. Some QR programs just take a food order, but others mine data like a patron’s dining history, age, and gender. The restaurant could use that info to send them coupons or event invitations—or sell it to third parties.
“It’s an example of companies exploiting COVID-19 to extend tracking,” says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU. “Moving everything to mobile opens people to new ways of tracking and control.”
Travelers should know that QR codes can be hacked; you might scan one, place a dinner order, and wind up compromising your credit card instead. Stanley recommends treating QR codes just as you do links in unknown emails. Either use your phone to look up the restaurant’s menu on the internet or install a protective app like Kaspersky QR Scanner, which will give users a warning if the code isn’t safe.
Contact-tracing tools
Public health groups used contact tracing methods to identify and track down people who were potentially exposed to infectious diseases such as Zika and HIV, and offer counseling, screening, and treatment. These traditional tools were usually based on phone calls to ask individuals about who they were in contact with and to continue researching exposure. The pandemic pushed officials to scale up such efforts and implement new, higher-tech ones to track viral spread and provide information.
For instance, Apple and Google added contact-tracing functions to new smartphone software, allowing users to opt in and get alerts if they come into close contact with an infected person.