Years ago, there seemed to be a concern that credit card magnetic strips can be damaged or erased by a magnet. We were even warned not to put the mag strips up against each other, because they could erase each other.
Fast forward to today and you have “wallets”, really just a a couple of plates and elastic, that jam credit cards right up against each other, and you have an iPhone with a strong magnet in the back, with wallet cases that put your cards right there.
Perhaps over-exaggerated is a better word. I don’t know anyone who had a problem with their credit card being crammed in their wallet with other credit cards. I’m sure they could be demagnetized by a very strong magnet, but how likely is that ever to happen in real life.
Right now there is a very big different concern with magnet strips: that criminals can easily copy the credit card information and use it to engage in fraudulent transactions–and that is why the industry is switching to chips.
The problem is more getting dragged across a strong magnet rather than just being next to one. I think there were some mythbuster experiments about it.
Regardless, I can’t remember the last time I swiped the magnetic stripe instead of using the contact chip or wireless feature.
I’ve always had this problem with hotel keys and never with credit cards. In fact, I recently stayed at a hotel that was in the middle of changing their locks , so I needed one key for the elevator and another for the room and I was told if I kept them near each other , they would get demagnetized.
The relevant term is coercivity which is a measure of how hard it is to erase and rewrite. Hotel card keys have lower coercivity because they have to be erased and rewritten so often. Credit cards can have high coercivity since they are meant to be permanent.
It’s been a while since I stayed at a hotel that was using mag-stripe cards. The ones I stay in these days all seem to have upgraded to RFID or NFC, requiring no contact/insertion/swiping.
It’s been a while since I’ve swiped a magstrip on a card for any reason. Credit card terminals and ATMs are all chip or touch pay. Casino and store club member cards are barcoded or chipped. Ditto for room keys and entry controls, all wireless or touch.
The only place I can remember using magstrips in years are single use tickets like parking garages, mass transit, or toll booths.
TBH, the reason the U.S. finally went to EMV was because of public concern after the Target breach. Given that Card Not Present transactions don’t use the chip, nobody in the biz expected fraud to do anything other than shift from in-person to online, and that’s exactly what happened.
The payments industry doesn’t really care about fraud: it’s a blip on their books. They care that we’re happy to use our cards. After Target, folks were freaked, and “Look, shiny!” calmed em down.
EMV took so long to be introduced here because it was viewed as a competitive DISadvantage. The fear was that if, as an average American with 3.84 credit cards, if one required waiting for an EMV transaction and one didn’t, we’d use the non-EMV one. Friction, ya know. The issuers claimed “cost” but that’s also BS. Most cards are made by a few companies and while EMV costs a few cents more, it’s trivial.
Now, if they’d thought it through, they would have sent EMV cards anyway as they expired. Eventually everyone would have had them, and then a rollout would have been consistent and painless. Instead they got to do it as a fire drill, at great cost.
But I’m sure some CxOs made big bonuses by delaying.
There have been a wide variety of excuses for why EMV chip technology took so long to take off in the US, along with related technologies like contactless RFID and mobile terminals in restaurants. I don’t know which of them is more accurate but the general consensus is that despite American technological leadership, US banks always seem to lag the rest of the world. Chip-based smart cards were available in Europe well over a quarter of a century ago, and first appeared in France about 38 years ago. I also don’t even understand the “waiting for an EMV transaction” argument. For many decades now all credit card transactions have been electronically authorized through a central VISA or MC network, and it usually just takes seconds.
As for magnetic stripes, I keep credit and debit cards together in a small credit card wallet and have never had a problem with the mag stripe. Sometimes I have my phone in that same pocket, but I don’t think it has anything magnetic on it.
However, use of the mag stripe has been disallowed for years here on any chip-enabled terminal, which is essentially all of them, so I wouldn’t necessarily know the stripe was bad because it’s almost never used. The only time I’ve seen it used in recent years is when doing in-person transactions at the bank, where for some reason the mag stripe on the debit card is what they use to verify your account information, and that has always worked.
I forgot to mention that my health card also has a magnetic stripe, but no chip. I keep it in that same wallet and that mag stripe has always worked, too.
Yep. Never been clear to me why this was so, but it has been. Complacency, sure, but why aren’t upstarts being more competitive?
In any case, what I stated need not be the only reason, but I was told by folks deeply involved in the Payments industry that they had heard the “friction” excuse directly from bank execs. smh…
I think the issue in question is this: chip takes about two seconds to get approval, whereas swiping the card is nearly instantaneous. At least with the early chip readers we had. It’s that extra two seconds, I kid you not, that had the US banking industry all worried.
Bah!
It takes more than 2 seconds to see where to insert the chip card, and then several seconds more for them to realize they inserted the wrong end of the card, so must remove it, reverse it, and re-insert it. Then you again wait for it to be approved.
I’ve had to wait behind someone way more than 2 seconds for them to get their chip card approved. That’s the reality the banking industry was aware of.