I’m a member of Clear dot com. The member I.D. card has a high res color photo and it also has a “smart chip”- a gold rectangle embedded into the plastic. It’s embedded ON the plastic, I should say, since I can feel the thin metal layer on one surface. This smart chip holds a huge amount of personal data which, coupled with a retina scan done in the airport, allows me to bypass the normal T.S.A. Security lines and go through.
My son is active USAF. During dinner he was passing around his Military I.D. card. It also has a smart chip on it.
I was under the impression that gold was a good conductor but I was not under the impression that gold is a great data storage medium. Unlike, say, silicon. Or ferrous materials.
If this is really gold and not just gold-colored, then I ask why in the world they are using gold at all as a data storage medium. Rather pricey next to some cooked-up and well-filtered melted down beach sand.
What you are seen are just gold-plated contacts.
They connect to a silicon chip in the card.
Gold is used because it has good conductivity, and it doesn’t oxidize.
Interesting. Then why not just make the contact points out of gold? On both the Clear card and the Man-Cub’s Military ID card, the entire surface of the smart chip area is gold colored.
Does that imply that the entire surface is the contact point?
There’s no reason for anything other than contact points to be at the surface. The chip itself is buried in the plastic. And you want the contact points to be fairly large, to allow for things like the card being put into the reader a bit crooked.
I might point out that virtually all credit cards in Canada (and most of the world outside the US) have embedded chips. Although most merchants in Canada can still accept mag strip cards. I have heard that this is increasingly difficult in Europe. I very rarely have to sign a CC slip any more. More to the point, I don’t ever have to give my card to a clerk or sign a receipt; I need only enter a PIN.
In Norway at least all cards have chips, and chip and pin is used preferentially, but all card readers I’ve seen can also read the mag strip also included on the card, and, in ordinary stores at least, they will use that if there’s a problem with the chip. (How this doesn’t defeat the whole “increased security” purpose of the chip I don’t know.)
Umm, the chip does NOT increase security in any way shape or form. In fact, there are apps available for some smart phones that allow a person to scan someone’s credit card chip and copy the info from a few inches away. Dedicated devices can do it from several feet away. It never has to leave your wallet/purse.
Credit card security has always been a joke and the chip ones have taken it down several notches.
No.
You are talking about RFID chips (non-contact RF scanning).
The chips on the cards with gold contacts require physical connections to read the data.
You are correct, but at least in Canada many (most?) cards that have the contacts ALSO can be read without physical connection. That’s because there are two distinct data sources in the same card (actually, there are three since I’m pretty sure all credit cards still have the magnetic stripe as well). You just tap the card on the reader. However, you are limited to how expensive a purchase you can make in that fashion; if you want to spend more than the limit you have to stick the card in the reader and enter your PIN.
I don’t object to the chip and PIN, but I agree that allowing cards to be read without physical connection is a HORRIBLE idea regardless of purchase limits!
