ROYAL MAIL ADDS BARCODES TO STAMPS

To send a hand-written letter is to take a break from today's digital world, says Dinah Johnson. So when she heard about the U.K. Royal Mail was adding barcodes to their stamps, she wasn't exactly thrilled.

The new stamps, unveiled earlier this year, allow correspondents to track their letters and share link photos and videos by scanning the digital barcodes with an app.

Johnson, founder of the Handwritten Letter Appreciation Society, said she acknowledges the benefits of technology. But she feels tech is forcing itself onto an age-old pastime.

"I feel a bit affronted about my letter being tracked, because there's something so pure and simple about letter writing and then the digital world has been kind of forced on it," Johnson told As It Happens guest host Ginella Massa.

The change will only affect "definitive" stamps, which are the regular-issued stamps of a country. Collectors' stamps with art and photos will remain the same. Non-barcoded definitive stamps will remain valid until Jan. 31, 2023. After that, people can swap their old stamps for new ones.

The beauty of letter-sending for Johnson is not knowing exactly when your letter will reach its destination, or when you'll receive one from someone else.

"The romance of it is that you don't know whether it'll ever get there. You send it out into the world and you hope it will," she said. "You leave it in the hands of the postal services and they do this amazing job."

To further express her frustration with the new stamps, Johnson has been placing customized stickers over the barcodes of letters she receives so she doesn't have to look at them.

Johnson's friend, who owns a printing press, made a design of a postbox with her organization's Twitter handle on it. In an interview with The Guardian, she called it her "mini private protest."

"I didn't want to be seen to be defacing Royal Mail stamps," she said. "I wasn't out to do that."

But she did it, and the letter arrived at its intended location safe and sound. A Royal Mail spokesperson told the Guardian that covering the barcodes is probably fine until January 2023, but after that, it will be "an essential part of the stamp."

Paper money has long had serial numbers, and private citizens can volunteer to track them via sites like Where's George. And I wouldn't be surprised if some money-counting machines have features that can read and flag notes sought by officials investigating kidnappings, money laundering and like crimes. But I doubt such a feature will come to coins anytime soon. When you spend a coin, it ceases to be yours. But when you mail a letter, it remains yours and you do care about whether and when it arrives at its destination. And the post office, encharged with delivering it for you, also has an interest in knowing where each piece is.

Affordable tracking technology didn't exist until recent times, but now that it's here its use is inevitable. My wish? Find a better way to encode the tracking number so it's not intrusive to the user. These Nintendo-style barcodes are like the hefty, blocky brick mobile phones of the 1980s, and perhaps someday they'll morph into something more discreet and pleasant to see. Or not see at all. -Editor